This past July I wrote about a major project that Italian pianist Alessandro Marangoni has been pursuing in conjunction with Naxos. At the time I thought that his goal was to record the piano music of Gioachino Rossini, focusing his attention on the series of fourteen unpublished albums composed between 1857 and the composer’s death in 1868, now all known collectively under the title Péchés de vieillesse (sins of old age); and, by the time I wrote the article, Naxos had released six volumes, two of which (Volumes 1 and 4), had two CDs. However, with the release of Volume 7 this past Tuesday, it would appear that Marangoni may wish to record all fourteen of the volumes, including those that are not just for piano.

Indeed, of the 22 tracks on this new release, Marangoni only performs on fourteen, playing organ on one of them and piano on the rest. The recording is shared with Marco Berrini’s Ars Cantica Choir, a chamber ensemble consisting of four sopranos (Maria Candela Scalabrini, Ilaria Zuccaro, Monica Susana Elias, and Barbara Maiulli), two altos (Morena Carlin and Floriano D’Auria), four tenors (Giuseppe Berrini, Massimo Lombardi, Sabino Manzo, and Fulvio Zannella), and five basses (Marco Grattarola, Alessandro Masi, Antonio Masotti, Luca Scaccabarozzi, and Ivan Cò). Eight of these vocalists perform as soloists on several of the selections. Two of the vocal works are accompanied by harmonium (Manzo); and two require obbligato percussion (basically four “sound effects”), provided by Marco Olivero. However, there are also several a cappella selections.

This all makes for a bit of a grab-bag; and my initial thought was that Marangoni was using this release to wrap up the entire project. However, if this is the case, that would mean that the entirety of the thirteenth volume, entitled Musique anodine, will be neglected. This would be more than a little peculiar, since it is the only volume in the set to which the Wikipedia author for the collection’s entry has assigned a date of composition (1857). (That date could be fixed because Rossini gave it to his wife Olympe to thank her for all the attentive care she had given during a period of long intermittent illness.)

If the recording is a miscellany, it is still an engaging one. It is particularly delightful to listen to what Rossini could do with combinations of voices singing together without any instrumental accompaniment. These moments surface occasionally in his operas; but in these selections the focus is on the singers and the text, rather than any broader narrative context. As to the solo piano selections, Marangoni remains as consistently attentive to the lightness of touch that Rossini brought to composing as he has been in the preceding releases. While my earlier article wrote about the danger of there being too much of a good thing in the full scope of this project, the diversity of genres in this new release makes the entire recording feel very much like a particularly well-balanced nineteenth-century salon concert.

http://www.examiner.com/article/pianist-alessandro-marangoni-releases-his-seventh-volume-of-rossini-s-sins