This is not, strictly speaking, a recording of Rossini’s Petite Messe solennelle. In 1867 the composer orchestrated the work, not because he thought it needed orchestrating but to discourage musical gold-diggers from doing so after his death. It is that version, published posthumously as Messe solennelle (it was no longer ‘petite’) that Antonio Pappano has chosen to record with the same choral and orchestral forces with which he made his superb account of Rossini’s Stabat mater (EMI, 1/11).

Conceived as a private act of remembrance, the original Petite Messe solennelle is a chamber Mass for 12 singers, two pianos and harmonium. Calming, occasionally joyful, often angst-ridden, it is a sublimated requiem for lost friends, much as Poulenc’s Litanies à la Vierge Noire would later be. One such friend was the church musician Louis Niedermeyer. The fact that the Messe had its premiere on the third anniversary of Niedermeyer’s death is not without significance since we now know that Rossini’s a cappella setting of the ‘Christe eleison’ is a memorial reworking of an ‘Et incarnatus’ from one of Niedermeyer’s own Masses.

The orchestrated version is, of course, a legitimate part of the Rossini canon. After a couple of disastrous attempts to record it during the LP era, there appeared a beautifully crafted Decca recording conducted by Riccardo Chailly which fully honours the spirit of the original. It was all we needed to know about the orchestral version and it remains all we need, given that Pappano’s performance is a rather less subtle affair, a bustling, bullish rendering caught in a somewhat rough and ready live recording. Pappano’s tenor is superior to Chailly’s but for the most part Chailly has the more eloquent and better-balanced solo quartet. There is also a very fine Chailly DVD version (EuroArts, 6/11).

The most sympathetic of all accounts of the Petite Messe solennelle is a too-long-neglected Bavarian church performance which the late Wolfgang Sawallisch directed live from the keyboard (Eurodisc, 12/85 – nla). Given that Pappano is a comparably gifted pianist-director, there’s a sense here of an opportunity oddly missed.