Having made a New Year’s resolution to stop banging on about collections of Rossini’s overtures that jumble up essentially arbitrary selections of overtures in running orders that are as unmusical as they are unchronological, I find my resolve being tested earlier than I imagined. Yet no matter. On paper, this new Decca collection looks a terrible jumble. In practice, it makes for marvellous listening, a truly memorable day out at the Rossini fair.
Musically everything is top notch. Chailly’s conducting is characteristically full-blooded, but stylish and witty too. Milan’s La Scala orchestra respond to his masterly direction with playing of tremendous colour, verve and corporate virtuosity. And Decca’s engineers have done that near impossible thing, found a venue (the Chiesa della Pace in Milan) and set up their microphones in such a way as to achieve a sound whose mixture of warmth, brilliance and immediacy ensures that all the overtures, big and small, come up in a razor-sharp focus.
For the most part, the collection juxtaposes the familiar with the rather less familiar. Nor are the less familiar pieces of lesser interest. The overture to Armida, with its solemn drum-beats and vertiginous warbling horns, is a case in point. And it was a very clever move indeed to include the overture to Bianca e Falliero which is itself a kind of guided tour of the later Neapolitan operas, containing as it does themes for La donna del lago, Ricciardo e Zoraide and Ermione (a wonderful crescendo passage that has become much more familiar since the opera’s rediscovery and sudden leap to fame).
I am not sure why it was thought worth including the overture to Rossini’s teenage prentice piece Demetrio e Polibio in the collection; that said, the La Scala wind players treat its themes with real affection. The fact is, this is one of those records when everything goes right. It offers an hour-and-a-quarter of untrammelled pleasure.'