Volume 7 of Rossini’s complete piano music, Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age), ranges across six of the fourteen albums to include works for both solo piano and for piano and voices. Two of the pieces – Andantino mosso (track 3), recently discovered in manuscript, and La notte di Santo Natale (track 5) receive their first recording. ‘Alessandro Marangoni sounds completely at home… and he presents the music with style, good humour and no mean virtuosity’ (MusicWeb International on 8.573107 / Volume 6).

Although Marilyn Horne was 58 years old at the time of this concert, no weakness clouded the beauty of her voice. Among the recordings over the course of Horne's career, there are many Rossini operas. This all-Rossini program shows that she could convincingly dominate the smaller forms as well.

REVIEW:

Little needs be said about Marilyn Horne, one of the greatest singers of all time, with a highly distinctive voice, immediately recognizable and colorful, a deep sense of musicality, and a vocal technique that is awe-inspiring. No ornamentation, no roulade, no trill, not the longest phrase, were beyond her phenomenal breath control. Add to this her almost magical personality.

Liederabend does need a word of explanation. The Liederbands (Liederabenden) were an extensive series of vocal recitals (over 60 years) performed at the Schwetzingen South- West Radio (Germany) Festivals. For all its touting as a Liederabend Horne’s program is all-Italian, all-Rossini (a Horne specialty). 19 songs, early and late, familiar and unfamiliar; all musical delights. Among the better known are ‘La pastorella’, ‘Bolero’, ‘La molinara’, the arias ‘Cruda sorte!’ (Italiana in Algeri and ‘Di tanti palpiti’ Tancredi. A few from ‘Sins of my Old Age’ are included.

Here is a great singer at the top of her form with most entertaining music. No texts, but a biography of Horne and a history of the Festival are included.

-- American Record Guide

Rossini wrote some of music’s most masterful and lovable operas. His gift for comic and tragic forms was matched by a relish for characterisation, qualities that are always evident in his overtures. La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie) is perhaps the most famous, one of the world’s most popular concert openers. But in Otello he reveals his more complex turns of phrase and in Le siège de Corinthe the writing is dramatic and colourful. The overture for Elisabetta, Regina d’Inghilterra was used again a year later by Rossini for Il barbiere di Siviglia. This is the first of four discs of the complete Rossini Overtures.

Rossini drew a line under his hugely successful operatic career at the age of 37 and wrote little until his final years in Paris, where he became renowned for his musical salons. For these he wrote numerous short piano pieces which he jokingly called Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age): sometimes experimental miniatures that can raise a smile or touch the heart, blurring boundaries between the irreverent and the serious. Rossini’s publisher Antonio Pacini considered the composer’s late works as his most illustrious period: ‘what he composes daily is a series of masterpieces that seems as though it will never end.’ Including songs and fascinating novelties, this acclaimed complete edition contains a myriad of rarities and numerous world premiere recordings.

Rossini’s Péchés de vieillesse or ‘Sins of Old Age’ is a series of thirteen volumes of piano works which were the main musical occupation of his last decade. The 24 pieces of volume twelve are of breathtaking variety, including flavours from Bach and Chopin, opera and the music-hall. Some revel in witty dances and bravura pianistic display, and one was written overnight to help a friend out of fi nancial debt. Alessandro Marangoni’s playing ‘sparkles and seduces over and over again’ (Toronto Star on Volume 2, 8.570766).