An interest, less than eager, more than merely polite, is what one might reasonably be expected to show in Rossini’s cantatas; occasional music guaranteed to provide occasional interest. The two gathered here, in what is billed as ‘Volume 1’ of a Rossini cantata series, come from very different periods in Rossini’s career, though there is common ground between them in as much as La morte di Didone is known to have been performed in Venice in 1818, around the time of the composition of the works – Armida, Ricciardo e Zoraide and Ermione – from which Rossini drew for the musical pot-pourri he concocted in 1846 in honour of the newly elected Pope Pius IX.
La morte di Didone was probably written for the soprano, Ester Mombelli, around 1811. It is more brilliant, more obviously dramatic than anything in the student opera, Demetrio e Polibio, which Rossini wrote for the Mombelli family during his time at the Liceo Musicale in Bologna. Equally, it is rather a gestural piece, lacking, as yet, something of the formal discipline Rossini would so rapidly acquire during his time in Venice in 1810-13.
The cantata is superbly sung on this new Decca disc by Mariella Devia, and finely accompanied; Rossini’s sensibility was inborn, not something he laboured to acquire, which is why his early music is best conducted by an expert. (Think of Beecham’s various recordings of the overture to La scala di seta and you will know what I mean.)
The Cantata for Pope Pius IX is a grand, public piece, commissioned in honour of a man (Rossini’s exact contemporary) who, in the heady days of the 1840s, was thought to be a radical, a reformer, a man of the people; but who turned out (like Rossini himself) to be altogether too moderate a figure for the hotheads of the risorgimento. In that sense, priest and musician were well matched. As for the Cantata, with its four soloists, massed choir, orchestra and additional banda, it is always threatening to fly the flag and raise the roof, but never quite does. This is because none of the source music is revolutionary (no hymn from Mose in Egitto, none of the really blood-curdling stuff from Le siege de Corinthe).
Chailly and his singers make the most of what there is, though their fine account of “Sacra chima, un di superba”, merely leaves one wondering why they are recording this and not Armida, of which this is the celebrated Act 1 quartet.
It is nice, certainly, to have first-time recordings of these works, though Decca’s puff on the back of the CD case – “cantatas … full of humour and drama … among his finest scores” – is rubbish. There is not a jot of humour in either cantata and the music is minor Rossini. How sad it is to find this once great industry so obviously (and, in the long run, so self-defeatingly) in thrall to the hype and the lies of the marketing men.'