In the old days, composers used to make lots of money by transcribing operatic numbers into all manner of musical forms; but this set of transcriptions from Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia goes one stage further. It attempts to make a self-contained entertainment, a so-called Musica buffa, out of the work by recycling various bits in nonchronological order as a buffo serenade for flute, oboe, bassoon, cello and harpsichord. The result is an irksome and essentially rather unfunny farrago that more than outstays its welcome.
In the original opera, the characters are marionettes up to a point. The woodwinds and strings are at once their confederates and a prurient audience gossiping among themselves as the characters become embroiled in ever more far-fetched ruses. Re-arranging the whole thing for voiceless quintet renders it merely mechanical and tedious, lacking in contrast and dissipating the comic tension between the human and the mechanistic. Apparently, the project started as a single transcription used as an encore to a concert of music by Janitsch and C. P. E. Bach. And that's how it should have stayed. The playing of the Munich Rococo Soloists is more spirited than refined; the recording is big and buxom.'