The piano music Rossini wrote for the celebrated Saturday Soirees which he and his second wife, Olympe Pelissier, hosted during the composer's final years in Paris (1857-68) is full of fascination: as salon music, musical satire and social comment, and for the insights it offers into Rossini's state of body and mind during the not entirely serene Indian summer of his career.
A talented pianist, with a light touch and a love of idiosyncratic fingerings, Rossini was admired, whilst alive, by some of the great lions of the keyboard, but his music has had few friends among twentieth-century pianists. Things might have been different had the greatly gifted young Italian pianist, Dino Ciani, not met his untimely end at the age of 33 in a road accident in 1974. At the time of his death, Ciani had recorded two complete books from the Peches de Vieillesse: the 'Album de Chaumiere' and the 'Album de Chateau' (Cetra, 1968).
Since Vol. 1 of Stefan Irmer's series for Dabringhaus und Grimm draws on a number of different volumes of the Peches de Vieillesse, we must assume that this series, like others that have gone before ('gone' being the operative word) started life as another toe-in-the-water affair: volumes to be added if sales permit. That said, Vol. 1, recorded in 1997, is strongly to be recommended; and so, in its rather more esoteric way, is Vol. 2, recorded last year.
It is clear from his fine booklet-essays, and the care with which the two volumes have been assembled, that Stefan Irmer understands Rossini, both the man and the musician. Volume 2 is subtitled 'Culinary Delights'. Like Rossini's own titles, this is essentially a sop to public taste, a way of luring us to the musical table. Once there, we find ourselves being addressed, not on food - hors-d'oeuvres and dried fruits, forsooth! - but on such relatively abstruse subjects as variation form, the joys and absurdities of Lisztian virtuosity, music as romantic gesture on the occasions when sadly it is little else, and the tribulations of composing a waltz while suffering the pain of constipation.
Stefan Irmer takes all such matters extremely seriously: and rightly so. The sombre colours and obsessive virtuosity of much of Rossini's writing makes it plain that the composer is not jesting. This, in turn, pre-empts the question: 'Does the playing lack ''charm''?' Where is the charm in Rossini's devilish address to Offenbach? Or in his frequent meditations on death: 'Memento homo' (a sideswipe, in part, at Liszt's B minor Sonata) or 'Un enterrement en carnaval'? Irmer recognizes the emotional bleakness of such pieces as well as the awkward and obsessive side of the answer to 'Memento mori', 'Assez de memento: dansons'. He also avoids making 'Une caresse a ma femme' too openly affectionate until after the domestic fracas. Only when the row is over does what had previously been rather formal canoodling become genuinely tender: a nice insight.
Though I was gratified by the speed at which Irmer plays the famous 'Marche et reminiscences pour mon dernier voyage' (the march itself can overstay its welcome) I was surprised by his matter-of-fact playing of some of the quotations, and by an uncharacteristic ironing out of dynamic contrast, something he doesn't often do during the course of these two splendidly recorded programmes. Dabringhaus und Grimm has made some famously fine organ recordings and its recording of the piano is here every bit as impressive. Bass sonorities are especially powerfully caught yet perfectly 'placed', harmonically and contrapuntally, within the sound mix.
These two discs include about a third of the piano pieces included in Books IV-X of the Peches de Vieillesse. Is it too much to hope that Mr Irmer will now go on to finish the job?'