Alessandro MARANGONI, pianoforte Laura GIORDANO, soprano (tracks 1-7) Alessandro LUCIANO, tenore (tracks 8-12) Bruno TADDIA, baritono (tracks 13-18)

	Luogo e data di registrazione		Baroque Hall, Ivrea, Torino (Italia) - Studio SMC Records: 2017 - 18 aprile (tracks 1,7) - 24 maggio (tracks 8-12) Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Firenze (Italia) - 2017 - 1 dicembre (tracks 13-18)
	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 | 8.573864 | (1 CD) | durata 67' 59" | (p) & (c) 2018 | DDD
	Note		-

When, in 1867, Rossini began organising the compositions he had been accumulating over the previous ten years or so, which he termed Péchés de vieillesse (‘Sins of Old Age’; the form of the titles given here preserves Rossini’s orthography), into albums, he was motivated not just by tidiness, but also by a clear-cut objective relating to their publication. He intended his wife, Olympe, to be able to sell the pieces to publishers on the most advantageous terms possible after he had died. The albums contain a varied selection of pieces—the classic dozen in most instances—in groupings based on content, musical criteria and the forces required. This can be seen most clearly in the first three vocal albums, Album Italiano (Volume I), Album français (Volume II) and Morceaux réservés (Volume III), all of which feature a balanced blend of solo and ensemble pieces arranged in a broadly symmetrical fashion. It is also possible to make out patterns in the keys or the ‘stories’ that have been set to music. After Volumes IV to X, which are devoted to piano and other instrumental music, comes a Miscelanée de Musique Vocale (Volume XI). Although the title betrays a less coherent collection of ten ‘surplus’ pieces, here too it is possible to make out a common thread in the domestic and religious subject-matter. In this anthology, Rossini’s autographs are presented just as Olympe handed them over to his home-town of Pesaro, as dictated by his last will and testament. (Today, they are curated there by the Fondazione Rossini.) Rossini had copies made of all the pieces, checking and, where necessary, correcting and completing them before signing them. In particular, he also added metronome markings, which he never included in his own autographs unless his publisher requested them—a clear indication that it was his intention to create accurate, printready master copies that his wife would only need to sell on, without having to part with the autographs. This is what she did, and a significant number of such authenticated manuscripts survived and were acquired in 1996 by Harvard University’s Houghton Library. While the albums in their original form certainly have a raison d’être and each can deliver a varied concert programme, Rossini’s salon practice was to take his cue from the artists available, each of whom would present pieces that were suitable for them at his Saturday soirées. Modern studio recordings have to be organised rationally, taking account of album playing times. The present recording brings together the solo numbers for soprano, tenor and baritone from the three albums discussed above and adds a couple of miniature gems. In his youth, when he was writing operas, Rossini had only ever composed when he had a definite end in mind and a libretto. In his old age, he also developed musical ideas when he didn’t have a poem available. When spontaneously inscribing album leaves, he always drew on the words of an aria from Metastasio’s Siroe, “Mi lagnerò tacendo / della mia sorte amara …”—‘I shall mourn in silence my unhappy fate…’. (This disc includes the premiere recording of an undated example  [6] .) He often used the same lines, stripped of any semantic connotation, to provide a syllabic underlay for more demanding compositions—a tirana, or Andalusian dancesong, for example: Tirana alla Spagnola (Rossinizzata) (‘Tirana in the Spanish Manner, given the Rossini treatment’, Péchés de vieillesse, Volume I, No. 3  [1] ). Sometimes he would ask one of his house poets to write some suitable verse for music that had been composed in this manner. In this case, the result was Amour sans espoir (Tirana all’Espagnole Rossinizée) to a text by Émilien Pacini (‘Love Without Hope [a tirana in the Spanish manner given the Rossini treatment]’, Volume XI No. 3  [7] ). With a few alterations to the tune and accompaniment, of course. Pacini also wrote some fairly free verses to fit the music for La grande coquette (Ariette Pompadour) (‘The Great Coquette [Pompadour Arietta]’, Volume II, No. 3  [4] ), which he dated ‘29th January 1862’. La Fioraja Fiorentina (‘The Florentine Flower Girl’, Volume I, No. 5  [2] ), one of the many ‘alms’ songs in Péchés de vieillesse, was also composed to Metastasio’s text, and its main tune can already be found in album leaves dating from 1848 and 1852. In this instance it was probably Giuseppe Torre who wrote the new text. Other pieces made the reverse journey. The Arietta all’antica, dedotta dal ‘O Salutaris Ostia’ (‘Arietta in the antique manner, derived from “O salutaris hostia”’, Volume XI, No. 7  [3] ) is a revised version of an a cappella quartet that Rossini had composed for the periodical La Maîtrise in 1857. Finally, there are numerous pieces that represent direct settings of new poems. Au chevet d’un Mourant (Elégie) (‘At the Bedside of a Dying Man [Elegy]’, Volume III, No. 8  [5] ) sets lines by Émilien Pacini without any intermediate stages; Rossini dedicated them to Pacini’s sister, Madame de Lafitte. The brother and sister were among seven children whose father, the publisher Antonio Pacini, died on 10 March 1866. Antonio had been one of the foremost publishers of works by Rossini as early as the 1820s and had made a remarkable assessment of Rossini’s late works as his ‘most illustrious period. What he composes daily are a series of masterpieces that seems as though it will never end.’ Interestingly, none of the pieces for tenor and baritone seem to have been based on the Metastasio text. All were probably directly inspired by the final poems. When Rossini had been composing operas, male voices had only been divided into tenors and basses. ‘Baritone’ was a concept that only gained currency around the middle of the 19th century, hence Rossini’s occasional flippant labelling of this voice-category as ‘baryton moderne’. Le Lazzarone. Chansonette de Cabaret (The Idler. A Little Cabaret Song’) was only assigned to the baritone as a second step, whilst L’ultimo Ricordo (‘The Final Keepsake’) remained earmarked simply for ‘Canto’ (voice). Rossini clearly did not wish to describe himself as a baritone, although, as a fine exponent of his Figaro aria, that was probably exactly his vocal tessitura. In this piece (Volume I, No. 4  [17] ), by replacing the name Elvira with Olimpia, he applies an old poem by Giovanni Redaelli about a dying husband to himself. In Le Lazzarone (Volume II, No. 8  [18] ), to words by Émilien Pacini (whose father was Neapolitan by birth), on the other hand, he was indulging his youthful memories of Naples (about which he had written in 1815: ‘Everything is beautiful, everything astounds me’). The tenor voice is given genre songs and character pieces. In La Lontananza (‘Distance’, Volume I, No. 2  [8] ), Giuseppe Torre, a Genoese librettist and poet, wrote a loving greeting from a far-away husband, and in L’Esule (‘The Exile’, Volume III, No. 2  [10] ) described the homesickness of an émigré. Although Rossini rejected seditious ideas and kept out of politics, as early as the 1830s he had had contact in Paris with many of his compatriots who had to leave Italy after the failed independence movements of 1831, and as this song demonstrates, he was well able to understand their feelings. Rossini gave Torre separate copies of both the pieces on 20 August 1858. The Roman archaeologist Alessandro Castellani was another exile. In 1861 he showed Rossini Il Fanciullo Smarrito (‘The Missing Child’), a song for which he had written both words and music, about the search for a little boy and a bell to summon attention. Rossini’s reaction was: ‘My dear boy, devote yourself to archaeology and leave composition to me.’ He dedicated his own setting (Volume I, No. 11  [9] ), which imitates the characteristic tinkling of the bell, to Castellani, who published it in 1881, commending it to ‘tenorini di grazie’. Émilien Pacini was also the poet behind Roméo (Volume II, No. 2  [12] ), a despairing lament on the part of Romeo over the presumed death of his Juliet (which Rossini also pressed into service as an Allegro agitato for cello and piano), and the quirky Le Sylvain (‘The Wood- Sprite’, Volume III, No. 9  [11] ), about a Silenus or faun whom the beautiful nymphs avoid because of his savage ugliness. Both before and during the period of his ‘Sins of Old Age’, Rossini also noted down numerous pieces that were too short to be included in his ‘publication project’. Most are album leaves which, because of their nature as works dedicated to individuals, neither remained in his possession nor made their way to Pesaro with the albums, instead being scattered around in archives and private collections all over the world. It is possible that more could come to light at any time. Often the lack of a specific dedication means that the recipient of the album leaf can no longer be determined. The ten-bar Vivace  [16]  dated ‘Bologna, 19th March 1846’, had already formed part of a longer composition which Rossini had dedicated to one Marietta Lombardi on 1 January 1846. An Allegretto moderato, dated ‘G. Rossini, Paris, 1862’  [13]  is another of his favourite pieces for album leaves and visiting cards, as is the Allegretto—Un rien (‘A Trifle’  [15] ) with its typical upwards glissando, dated ‘Paris, 12th Dec. 1860, G. Rossini’. Another Allegretto  [14]  had a specific purpose: it was to be sent by telegraph from Paris to Amiens. At the foot of the work are the words ‘For G. Caselli | G. Rossini | Paris, 22nd January 1860’, and underneath the recipient added: ‘Autograph by Gioacchino Rossini, cabled from Paris to Amiens | G. Caselli’. It was the first transmission of a ‘fax’ using the ‘pantélégraphe’, a device invented by Giovanni Caselli that used telegraphy to transmit documents, and was an effective piece of publicity. Contrary to what might be expected of him, Rossini’s gesture demonstrates that he was in no way averse to technological innovation! Reto Müller Translation: Sue Baxter