The Swedish pianist Helge Antoni has assembled here a tempting hour's worth of late piano music by Rossini; there is even a rarity that I haven't come across before, a piece that is sub-titled with a typical mix of accuracy and whimsy ''Little walk from Passy to Courbevoie, going through—homeopathically and a la Pesarese—all the keys of the chromatic scale''. Unfortunately, Antoni's interpretative style is strident to a fault, with more than a hint of what Rossini would have anxiously recognized as the spirit of the barricades. There is, for instance, nothing caressing about his playing of Une caresse a ma femme. In general, the playing is inordinately loud, dry, and percussive, a ferocious tintinnabulation that the urbane Rossini would have blanched to hear.
True, Antoni's iron touch heightens the drama of the ill-fated journey of the pleasure-seeking railway excursion (Rossini loathed trains even more than Margaret Thatcher and would have expected to take fright at this number). Equally, the funeral march element in the Marche et reminiscences pour mon dernier voyage takes on a aptly clangorous, Beethovenish feel in this recording. But once we reach the self-quotations in this valedictory number, Antoni's apparent lack of sympathy with Rossini is again laid bare. The quotations from Tancredi and La Cenerentola are quite without charm, the Semiramide theme chatters like a machine-gun, Ory's ironic hymn is robbed of its proper legato, and there is no hint of pathos in the famous Gondolier's song from Otello.
One gets the impression amid all this that Antoni is an enthusiast for the music, relishing its every second; but had he given such a stunningly extrovert display as this at one of Rossini's Saturday soirees I suspect he would have been out on his ear and back in the Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin before he could say Bill Tell.'