Alessandro MARANGONI, pianoforte Giuseppina BRIDELLI, mezzo-soprano

	Luogo e data di registrazione		Baroque Hall, Ivrea, Torino (Italia) - Studio SMC Records: 27-29 luglio 2017
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producers		Renato Campajola & Mario Bertodo
	Recording engineers		Renato Campajola & Mario Bertodo
	Editors		Renato Campajola & Mario Bertodo
	Edizione CD		NAXOS | 8.573865 | (1 CD) | durata 67' 19" | (p) & (c) 2018 | DDD
	Note		-

Surveying the female roles in Rossini’s comic operas and the trouser roles in his opere serie, one quickly comes to the conclusion that he favoured the contralto voice. In the 1850s he set out his artistic creed on this matter: ‘The contralto is the norm against which the other voices and instruments of the composition must be gauged. If you want to do without the contralto, you can push the prima donna assoluta as high as the moon, and the basso profondo right down to the bottom of the well. And this will create the illusion that the moon is reflected in the well. It is advisable to concentrate on the central register in order achieve a consistently good sound. At the extremes, what you gain in power you often lose in grace, and by this abuse you paralyse the throat, resorting as a remedy to canto declamato, that is, out-of-tune bawling. Then it becomes necessary to give the orchestration more body in order to cover the excesses of the voices, to the detriment of good musical colour. This is common practice nowadays, and when I am gone, it will be worse still. The head will rule the heart; art will be subordinated to learning, and what passes for instrumental writing will bury the voices and true feeling under a flood of notes. Heaven forfend!!!’ The term contralto should not be understood too narrowly in this context, of course. When Rossini was writing operas, only the female singers with a limited tessitura who sang secondary roles were described as mezzo-sopranos, while the first ladies had soprano or contralto voices with a greater range. It was not until he moved to France that Rossini started using the term mezzo-soprano more frequently to refer to the medium voice, as we do today. In recommending taking the contralto as a basis when composing music, Rossini was thinking of the medium voice in general. When he did not have any true contraltos available, as was the case for many of the Neapolitan operas with the prima donna soprano Isabella Colbran, he wrote the soprano parts largely for the middle of the voice, with relatively few, well-integrated forays into the upper register. Rossini’s commitment to the middle register fits in perfectly with the image of a composer in whose work everything is subordinated to clear structures, balance and equilibrium. This makes him the last of the Classical composers, as he himself said he was. It is therefore unsurprising that of the 29 solo pieces contained in the four vocal albums of the Péchés de vieillesse (‘Sins of Old Age’), 14 are for these two voice types (ten for mezzo-soprano and four for contralto). These (insofar as they have not already been recorded for this series of releases) and other pieces for mezzo-soprano not included in the main albums form the basis of this album. Included in the Album italiano is La regata veneziana. Tre canzonette (Volume I, Nos. 8–10  [1] – [3] ; all titles are given here in Rossini’s orthography). This ‘triptych’ characterises the state of mind of a young woman called Anzoleta before (avanti), during (co passa) and after (dopo) the regatta or rowing competition (La regata) in which her lover, a gondolier named Momolo, is taking part. It is the only time in the Péchés de vieillesse that Rossini sets dialect. The original text, penned by Verdi’s librettist Francesco Maria Piave, and bearing an extremely formal dedication to Rossini, has survived. Given that the first song also exists in an earlier French version dated 17 August 1858, in which love guides a sailor’s boat, it seems likely that for his homage to Venice, Rossini ordered a text in the correct metre from a Venetian poet—either directly, or with the help of a third party (Verdi himself?). The Chanson de Zora. La Petite Bohémienne from the Album français (Volume II, No. 5  [4] ) is a genre piece in which a travelling gypsy girl conceals her hard life behind the refrain ‘And Zora will smile, as she dance and sings’. The text is by Émile Deschamps. In Le Dodo des enfants (Volume II, No. 7  [5] ) a mother rocks her seriously ill child to sleep and asks God to save him. The piece was originally written to the text Mi lagnerò tacendo, with Émilien Pacini substituting new words. Adieux à la vie! Élégie (sur une seule note) (Volume II, No. 9  [6] ) is sadder still. In it, a girl who has been forsaken by her lover takes leave of life. Although it is all sung on one note (middle C), Rossini’s depiction is heart-rending. Many years later, the cellist Gaetano Braga recalled that Rossini had ‘composed a canzonetta in Paris which he dedicated to all tenors who had lost their voices—to Metastasio’s words Mi lagnerò tacendo, on a single note.’ Braga continues: ‘But he really composed it for me; he used to jokingly call me his Rubini. He would make me sing it to his friends and would always play the accompaniment.’ The cellist wrote the piece down from memory in 1899, and it shows beyond doubt how this ‘tune’ originated to the usual words from Siroe, which were then probably replaced by Pacini. L’Orpheline du Tyrol. Ballade élégie (Volume II, No. 11  [7] ) is another sad song, about a beggar girl who has lost her mother, but Rossini manages to endow the opening melody, based on Un’empia mel rapì from Ermione (1819), with the folkloric colouring of a yodelling song. Marietta Alboni is reputed to have performed the song at a soirée in Beau-Séjour (Passy) in 1858. For the Ariette à l’ancienne Rossini fell back on a text by Jean-Jacques Rousseau which the author had also set to music. In this lover’s lament, nature becomes a wilderness in the absence of the beloved. Rossini dedicated a copy in his own hand to the contralto Adelaide Borghi-Mamo on 30 November 1858, and she performed the piece at his home on 22 January 1859. Before assigning the original to the album of Morceaux réservés (Volume III, No. 11  [8] ), he made numerous small alterations. The Ariette villageoise from the Miscellanée de musique vocale (Volume XI, No. 1  [9] ) has the same text, but the setting is completely different. In La Chanson du bébé (Volume XI, No. 2  [10] ) it is possible to see the ‘gros bébé’ who insists on being spoilt as Rossini himself. This explains the central section, in which the child suddenly demands the ‘sapper’s song’ from Offenbach’s Barbe-Bleu (which had received its premiere on 5 February 1866)—a passage which Rossini quotes in an altered form. The mention of the operetta and cafe-concert stars Hortense Schneider and Emma Thérésa Valadon rounds off the little Offenbach persiflage. This was Rossini’s own idea; a draft text for Pacini has survived which also mentions La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein. This means the song was written after the premiere of La Grande-Duchesse on 12 April 1867 and proves that Rossini had not stopped following contemporary musical developments and commenting on them. The 3/8 time signature of Aragonese (Volume XI, No. 6  [11] ) suggests that Rossini was making reference to the music of the ‘jota aragonesa’, a folk dance from the province of Aragón in northeastern Spain. It is very possible that he would have replaced the familiar Metastasian syllabic template with a suitable text if he had had a Spanish poet to hand. In the album, Rossini designated the piece ‘Pour Soprano’, but the term ‘Canto’ against the vocal line shows that its medium tessitura is equally suitable for mezzo-soprano. Un rien (pour album) (Volume XIV, No. 9  [12] ) to the simple words ‘Ave Maria gratia plena’ is a short but sensitive antiphon setting of the angel’s salutation. Questo palpito soave (Volume XIV, No. 13  [13] ) could almost be taken from an opera with its sustained but richly decorated melody and its questioning about the nature of the mysterious feeling. It seems only to lack a cabaletta which would supply the answer, ‘love’. Both pieces are preserved among the Altri Péchés de vieillesse (‘Other Sins of Old Age’) at the Fondazione Rossini in Pesaro and have hitherto remained largely unknown. Sorzico  [14]  is Rossini’s spelling of zortziko, a verse or song form typical of the Basque county. The meaning of zortziko is something along the lines of ‘eights’, and it is normally written in 5/8 time, but Rossini wrote his album leaf in 5/4. The piece probably dates from the end of his life, but the unusual time signature and themes from it can already be found in an album leaf for Cherubini from the 1830s. Another Mi lagnerò tacendo setting entitled Un rien – pour album  [17]  is to be found in the Fondazione Rossini’s ‘other autographs’ category, as is Sorzico. Rossini dedicated another setting of the text that is decidedly odd melodically and harmonically speaking to a certain M. Robin under the title Un rien  [18]  on 1 June 1860, but he had noted down a shorter variant of it as early as 12 September 1850. Ferdinand Hiller’s autograph book in Cologne contains an otherwise unknown melody  [19] , which was probably given to him in 1855 in Trouville. Rossini set the moving farewell La separazione  [20]  by Fabio Uccelli to music in Florence for his pupil Corinna De Luigi (née Nanni), possibly when he sent her to Paris, armed with a letter of recommendation, to pursue a career in the theatre. Clearly nothing came of it, but the piece was published in 1858 by Escudier. This may have been one of the reasons why Rossini did not include it in his albums of Péchés de vieillesse, which, being a legacy for his wife, were only intended to contain unpublished pieces. The two magnificent songs À Grenade  [15]  and La Veuve andalouse  [16] , both subtitled Ariette espagnole, suffered the same fate. Rossini initially planned to include them in his album of mixed songs, but both were published by Escudier as Deux nouvelles compositions the same year they were composed (1863), and they were therefore excluded from the Péchés, where they should ideally belong. The Arietta spagnuola  [21] , on the other hand, was written as early as 1821 or 1822. Rossini and the presumed author of the words, Isabella Colbran, probably dedicated the piece to the young painter Felice Cottrau, who was in love with Isabella, when they told him about their planned wedding. It has been recorded here as written in the first edition of 1824, with the fourth verse constituting the conclusion of the song and not a refrain. It is an example of how certain song forms in Rossini’s Péchés de vieillesse already existed in the far-off days of his career as an operatic composer and made the middle of the voice their ideal. Reto Müller Translation: Sue Baxter