Alessandro MARANGONI, pianoforte (tracks 1-18) & Harmonium (track 7) Massimo QUARTA, violino (tracks 1-3) Enrico DINDO, violoncello (tracks 4-6) Ugo FAVARO, corno (tracks 9-11) Lilly JØRSTAD, mezzo-soprano (track 18) Bruno TADDIA, baritono (tracks 15-16) ARS CANTICA CHOIR / Marco BERRINI, direttore (track 7) Marco BERRINI, clochette (track 7)

	Luogo e data di registrazione		Baroque Hall, Ivrea, Torino (Italia) - Studio SMC Records: 2017 - 27 marzo (tracks 7,9-11) - 28 marzo (tracks 8,12-14,17) - 18 aprile (tracks 15-16) - 8 luglio (tracks 1-3) - 25 luglio (track 18) - 25 settembre (tracks 4-6)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producers		Renato Campajola & Mario Bertodo
	Recording engineers		Renato Campajola & Mario Bertodo
	Editors		Renato Campajola & Mario Bertodo
	Special thanks		Reto Müller & Sergio Ragni
	Edizione CD		NAXOS | 8.573822 | (1 CD) | durata 79' 21" | (p) & (c) 2018 | DDD
	Note		-

The date generally accepted as marking the beginning of Rossini’s miraculous return to regular composition is 14 April 1857, when he dedicated the Musique anodine to his wife Olympe. However, this should not blind us to the fact that the origins of this ‘new’ compositional phase, which he himself described as his Péchés de vieillesse (‘Sins of Old Age’), lay much further back, with some aspects dating from the period when he was still working as an opera composer (1810–29). The Soirées musicales (published in 1835) anticipate the vocal compositions of the Péchés de vieillesse, from which they are stylistically almost indistinguishable, and during the period from 1835 to 1857 Rossini wrote a plethora of short compositions, mostly album leaves, which also foreshadow the Péchés de vieillesse. Moreover, the collection of Péchés de vieillesse itself forms less of an organic whole than it initially appears to. Alongside those sorted into the albums held by the Fondazione Rossini in Pesaro (for which there is a handwritten outline, held by the Fonds Michotte in Brussels), there are many other ‘Sins of Old Age’ which were not included, either because they were surplus to requirements, or because they represented preliminary sketches or variants, or had been published without the composer’s permission. Rossini left his autographs to his home town of Pesaro, stipulating that his wife should have unrestricted rights of use over them for the rest of her life. Rossini’s decision not to publish his Péchés de vieillesse during his lifetime thus appears to have been based on commercial considerations, and Olympe did in fact try to get the best price she could for selling the rights to the unpublished works. The pieces recorded here give an overview of the diversity in their origins. (The form of the titles preserves Rossini’s orthography.) [1] ‘Allow me to recommend you write the sonata based on the Romance from Otello and entitled “Le Souvenir di Rossini a Paganini”’, Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840) urged Rossini in the 1830s, when the two old friends often met in Paris. As far as we are aware, no such piece was ever composed, and Rossini, perhaps remembering his old promise, probably penned Un mot à Paganini (Élégie) many years after ‘the Devil’s violinist’ had died. [2] The short Allegretto is a really catchy tune—one of those ‘ideas that go round and round in your head’, as Rossini once put it, and which he used countless times, including on small visiting cards which he distributed in 1856 in Bad Kissingen. The motif eventually found its way into the Prélude in Musique anodine. Rossini dedicated the version for violin with piano accompaniment to the singer Adelaide Borghi-Mamo (1826–1901) on 15 December 1853. A beautiful lithograph of her published in Paris in the Album du Grand monde, along with a facsimile of the piece, describes it as an impromptu. A copy was also printed in The Illustrated London News of 6 January 1855. [3] Among the students at the Liceo Musicale in Bologna, where Rossini was honorary director from 1839 to 1848, was the gifted violinist Giovacchino Giovacchini (1825–1906). Rossini wrote a Tema for him, dedicating it ‘To Giovacchini | G. Rossini | Bologna, 12th April 1845’. The two-page autograph manuscript is housed at the conservatory in Florence, while the Fonds Michotte in Brussels holds a single-sided autograph copy that lacks the title and dedication, as well as Giovacchini’s own introduction to and variations on the theme that had been dedicated to him. [4] Rossini met the Belgian cellist François Servais (1807–1866) in Paris and was so taken with his playing that, on impulse, he made him a present of Un mot pour basse et piano. (Rossini had studied cello when he was at the Liceo Musicale.) The autograph, which bears a dedication ‘to Servais | Rossini | Paris, 20th March 1858’ was recently discovered in a private collection in Belgium. Servais copied the cello part onto a separate sheet of paper, indicating the point where he lacked a contrasting theme that would enable him to compose variations on the piece. Rossini added another eight bars to this sheet. The piece is recorded here in this latter, completed form, first published in 2016 in La Gazzetta, the journal of the German Rossini Society. [6] Rossini stayed in contact with Servais and was soon calling him the ‘Paganini of the cello’. On 23 March 1861, Servais performed Une larme, Thème et Variations at Rossini’s salon, having learned it in just two days. Rossini had originally written a 33-bar piece in memory of the late cellist Michael Wielhorski (1788–1856). Now, for Servais (or, initially, for the Italian cellist Gaetano Braga), he prefaced it with a 14-bar piano introduction and added a set of variations culminating in a virtuosic ensemble for the two instruments. The result was a ‘cello concerto’ in miniature with sections marked Andantino – Allegro moderato – Meno mosso – Allegro moderato – Andantino – Allegro brillante. [5] The Meno mosso section of Une larme (bars 65–88) also crops up in the central section of the Allegro agitato, for which only the cello part has been preserved in Pesaro. The nature of the piano part that doubtless would have belonged to it can be deduced from Une larme and the mélodie Roméo from the Album Français of the Péchés de vieillesse. This is probably the form in which the piece was played at a soirée in the spring of 1867, when Gaetano Braga, for whom it may possibly have been written, was accompanied at the piano by Rossini himself. [7] Rossini placed the Tarantelle pur sang (avec traversée de la procession) in the Album de Château, an album devoted entirely to piano pieces, where the processional chorale (of 51 bars) is for piano solo; all attempts to find the ‘Chorus, harmonium, bell at the end, ad libitum’ indicated in the manuscript have so far been in vain. However, in Brussels there is a complete, clean transcript in which the processional is written out for chorus (SATB) with harmonium accompaniment. The verses, which invoke San Gennaro, the patron saint of Naples, before the Virgin, are somewhat clumsy and may have been penned by Rossini himself. The piece was performed at least twice in this form at soirées in Rossini’s home (on 31 March 1865 and 17 April 1866). [8] Among the Péchés de vieillesse in Pesaro which were not assigned to an album, Alessandro Marangoni discovered the hitherto uncatalogued Thème et Variations. Writing in his book I Péchés de vieillesse di Gioachino Rossini (Naples, 2015), he says: ‘It is clear from the manuscript that the author initially only noted down the theme, in E minor, possibly just jotting it down on a sheet of paper. The words et variations have been added to the title … furthermore, the signature after the final bar of the theme has been erased so as to continue with the variations.’ The piece, which is both technically demanding and harmonically and dynamically sophisticated, displays other amendments reminiscent of those typically found in Rossini’s final drafts. It looks almost as though he himself misfiled the piece—otherwise his failure to include this polished composition in any of the albums is difficult to explain. [9]–[11] Like the elegy Un mot à Paganini, Rossini placed the autograph manuscript of Prélude, Thème et Variations for horn and piano in the ninth album of his Péchés de vieillesse. The Prélude shares the other piece’s elegiac tone, which is particularly well suited to the sonority of the horn. It is simply dedicated ‘to Vivier, G. Rossini’. The Fondazione Rossini holds another autograph copy of the same piece which has a complete dedication: ‘To the charming Vivier. A small token of my friendship, from Gioachino Rossini. Paris, 11th May 1857’. It thus dates from the time, just a few months after his visit to the health resorts of Wildbad und Bad Kissingen, when Rossini started composing regularly again. Eugène Vivier (1817–1900) was considered the most outstanding horn player of his day. Rossini already knew him from his brief stay in Paris in 1843, when Adolphe Adam had introduced him with the words: ‘This is a horn that can sing and play the violin’. Rossini’s variations certainly prove Vivier’s virtuosity. The composer’s biographer Radiciotti describes the piece as a ‘Rondeau fantastique in two parts’. Rossini’s love of the horn, which is also given frequent solo parts in his operas, is certainly also attributable to his father having been a horn player and Rossini thus having been familiar with the instrument from infancy. [12] On 12 December 1841 a pretty Valz – Composto par G. Rossini was published in Keepsake des Pianistes, which had been advertised to subscribers of the Parisian Revue et Gazette musicale some weeks earlier. Rossini’s publisher Troupenas took legal action against his rival Maurice Schlesinger because of this unauthorised publication. (Schlesinger was already mixed up in the clash over the rights to the Stabat Mater.) It emerged from the appeal proceedings of 6 January 1843 (which decided in favour of Rossini) that ‘it was alleged that Rossini had penned the waltz in question for the album of a foreign princess, who had made it public’, and that the piece had already been published in Germany five years previously. Rossini never regarded a dedication as implying any assignment of copyright, as the fact that he inscribed pieces that were identical or similar for more than one person also demonstrates. He used similar versions of the theme of this waltz for piano for Eugenia Puerati, for Madame Charles de Rothschild (née Adelheid Herz) and, in 1849, for Elena Bandiera Ricci. [13] It was mainly Rossini’s Péchés de vieillesse that were played at his soirées, but they also featured excerpts from his operas and, more rarely, from those by other composers. When Giuseppe Verdi was the talk of Paris in 1865, Rossini had the Adagio, Te sol, quest’anima from the final trio of Attila performed. As this has less than a bar’s lead-in, Rossini wrote five bars of introduction. He headed them Ritournelle pour l’Adagio du Trio d’Attila, noting underneath ‘Without Verdi’s permission | Rossini 1865’. There is no evidence that Verdi himself was present. [14] The well-known Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick reported that when he visited Rossini on 18 July 1864, the composer ‘was so kind as to play me his harmonisation of the old Marlborough song. It is amazing that Rossini of all people, having never been given to modulatory subtleties, has furnished this folk song with a wealth of ingenious harmonies and enharmonic surprises.’ The early-18th-century satirical song about the Duke of Marlborough was so popular that Beethoven, among others, also arranged it. According to Norbert Pritsch, the harmonisation of Marlbrough s’en va-t-en guerre shows ‘that Rossini turned a simple, rather trivial melody into a little musical gem’. [15] Rossini wrote L’ultimo pensiero. Un Rien for ‘Baryton moderne’ and piano ‘for Mr L. Cerruti (for his album)’. Cerruti himself wrote the words to it. In his capacity as consul to the Italian Embassy in Paris, Luigi Cerruti (1819– 1893) paid Rossini a small annual pension granted by the newly formed Italian state. Cerruti, whose own life had been politically eventful, describes the feelings of a dying exile. The autograph, dated ‘Passy, near Paris, 4th August 1865’, is still in the possession of Cerruti’s descendants in Dresden. Patricia B. Brauner and Daniela Macchione kindly produced a critical edition for this recording. [16] Rossini set four lines from Pietro Metastasio’s Artaserse, giving his piece the title Metastasio. Pour album. He left out the lover Megabise’s predictable application of the analogy to himself (‘Sopito in dolce oblio | sogno pur io così | colei che tutto il dì | sospiro e chiamo.’). Sergio Ragni wrote that Rossini may have been looking for another poem that could be given a whole range of settings, like Mi lagnerò tacendo. However, the piece remained a one-off and did not even find a place in the albums of the Péchés de vieillesse; it is housed in Pesaro with the other unassigned ‘Sins’. [17] The Petit souvenir, which is inscribed ‘presented to her ladyship Baroness Charlotte Nathaniel de Rothschild by her very devoted G. Rossini, Paris, 10th September 1843’, is quite a substantial composition for such a dedication. It is neatly notated on manuscript paper with a printed, colour decoration featuring scenes of people making music and embellishments. It shows the high regard in which Rossini held his dedicatee, the musically gifted daughter of his banker friend James de Rothschild. Having watched her growing up between 1825 and 1836, he had encountered her again during his brief return to Paris, newly married to Nathaniel de Rothschild, a scion of the London branch of the family. [18] In a letter to Balzac dated November 1834, Olympe Pélissier mentions singing in a concert, while another letter mentions a new work by Rossini. Did Olympe sing the cantata Giovanna D’Arco (which Rossini later dated 1832) at this concert, which probably took place on 12 November 1834? The volume of Prose e versi (London 1836) by Count Carlo Pepoli (who wrote the libretto for Bellini’s I puritani) casts doubt on this assumption; the strophes, lines and structure of the poem Eleonore d’Este, which Pepoli says was set to music by Rossini, show unmistakable similarities to Giovanna d’Arco. There is a letter dating from the 1850s in which Rossini writes to his friend Luigi Crisostomo Ferrucci in Florence: ‘Would you care to adapt a few strophes of Giovanna d’Arco for me? Come, and we’ll do it together.’ It would thus appear that the music was initially destined for Eleonora’s lovesick longing for Torquato Tasso and did not assume the form in which it is better known today, that of Giovanna d’Arco, until much later. What is certain is that Marietta Alboni gave a performance of the cantata at Rossini’s salon on 1 April 1859, with the composer at the piano. Reto Müller Translation: Susan Baxter