Rossini and his old friend Meyerbeer would have been charmed and gratified by this marvellous song recital by Thomas Hampson and Geoffrey Parsons. It was Rossini's phenomenal success in the years 1813–18 that was largely responsible for Meyerbeer's abandoning a promising instrumental career in exchange for the bright lights of the operatic world. In 1825 Rossini oversaw the Parisian premiere of Meyerbeer's Il crociato in Egitto and thereafter the two men remained firm friends. In Paris in the 1830s they both wrote songs to be sung in gilded salons by gilded voices to a gilded social elite; and Meyerbeer was still on hand at the time of the first private performances of Rossini's Petite messe solennelle in Paris in 1864. Indeed, he was so moved by the Messe, Rossini feared for his health. And with good reason; before two more months were out, Meyerbeer was dead.
Whoever selected the songs for this recital must be congratulated on providing such a masterly distillation of what the two composers had to offer at various stages in their lives. Of the two, Meyerbeer is the more eclectic. As Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau revealed in a superb and sadly deleted Archiv disc of the 1970s, Meyerbeer ranged from delightful folk-song settings, through charmingly romanticized melodies, to piquant comedy and high melodrama. Faced with folksy poems by Heine and Muller, he writes in a most agreeable way, looking back to Schubert (in Komm!, which is an extended version of the poem used by Schubert in his Das Fischermadchen) and forward to the Mahler of Des Knaben Wunderhorn. True, his settings of the Heine poems that reappear in Schumann's Dichterliebe are no match for their later rivals. How one misses the searching psychologically charged effect of Schumann's piano epilogue in Hor' ich das Liedchen klingen, or his lightening brilliance in Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, where Meyerbeer is more conventionally reflective. But none of Meyerbeer's settings is in any way flaccid or unmusical. The several wry French songs are a delight (and not just the familiar song of the flea Le chanson de Maitre Floh). And it is difficult not to be struck by the longest of the songs, the melodramatic scena about a dying poet. The cover of a contemporary printed edition of this song shows the poet, bed-ridden and lyre in hand, requesting a final keepsake from a trio of angelic women hovering above in the circumambient gloom. The illustration is a fine 1830s period-piece, and so is the song.
There is melancholy in some of the Rossini settings, too. The group begins at the bedside of another dying man—the music written very much in the anxious vein of parts of the Petite messe solennelle—and it ends with one of the most moving of all nineteenth-century songs, Rossini's L'ultimo ricordo in which a dying man presses a faded flower into the hands of the woman he loves—in this case, Rossini's second wife Olympe, who nursed him back to health and whom he adored, odd as she undoubtedly was.
Yet, as the old shepherd says in The Winter's Tale: ''Thou met'st with things dying, I with things new-born'', Rossini's Offenbach-spoof La chanson du bebe is a small comic masterpiece, with its greedy defecating baby precociously demanding to hear a number from Offenbach's Barbe-bleue. And there are more delights in the cabaret-song Le lazzarone, Rossini confronting the carpe diem theme with an unabashed celebration of the delights of macaroni, wine, cheese and tomatoes.
Thomas Hampson's versatility—musically, dramatically and linguistically—seems to know few bounds during the recital. He is a stylish singer but also a generous-hearted one, not afraid of the overt expression of emotion. And he is in superb voice. It is also a great joy to hear piano playing of such sophistication and accomplishment. Rossini was a fine pianist in his own right, but rarely on record has his vocal music (let alone his solo piano music) been accorded the degree of sympathetic understanding Geoffrey Parsons brings to it here. Happily, EMI have provided these two fine artists with an absolutely first-rate recording: full-bodied and carefully balanced. As a double bicentenary celebration (Meyerbeer was born in 1791, Rossini in 1792) this is a recital that is apt and memorable on many counts. It would be folly to miss it.'