As Channel Classics and MDG’s slowly progressing Rossini piano music cycles reach their respective fifth volumes, along comes the first disc in a projected complete Rossini piano edition from Chandos, featuring pianist Marco Sollini. Five unpublished and previously unrecorded pieces open the disc. Save for the zesty Scherzo in A minor from 1850, they’re basically fluff. But in the strange little Morceaux Réservés, rising and falling whole-tone scales are subjected to fascinating harmonizations, culminating in a song for contralto and piano (“My wounded heart”).
The meat of Sollini’s recital lies in the nine solo-piano pieces from the Album pour piano, violin, violoncelle, harmonium et cor. How can such appealing and felicitous music remain off the piano repertoire’s radar screen? Probably because these pieces don’t “play themselves” and usually fall flat when performed in Sollini’s literal, workmanlike fashion. Here the Impromptu tarantellise’s implicit sparkle and zip only emerge in flickers. Sollini makes little of Échantillon du Chant de Noël à l’Italienne’s bel canto possibilities, and often phrases unimaginatively. In measure 27 and similar spots, for example, he voices the woodwind-like writing in a uniform manner, barely differentiating the inner melodic lines from the outer B-flat pedal points. The pianist glosses over the tongue-in-cheek drama throughout the remarkable Marche et Réminiscences pour mon dernier voyage, and blandly projects the composer’s self-referential opera quotations as if unfamiliar with their original context.
In other words, there’s so much more to this music than Sollini lets on. What’s more, the engineering conveys a hollow, “wrong end of the telescope” sonic impression, with little air between the notes and the piano’s overtones siphoned off. On the positive side are Sergio Ragni’s superbly written, scholarly, and informative annotations.
