Remembering the Anniversary of Rossini’s Death

courtesy of Sony Music

Gioachino Rossini died, at the age of 76, 150 years ago last month. Sony Classical marked this anniversary occasion last month with the release of the album Hommage à Rossini, featuring cellist Raphaela Gromes, who records exclusively with Sony. This is a little bit peculiar, since Rossini wrote only one composition for cello and piano; and that was not published in his lifetime. That piece was “Une larme” (a tear), which was in the ninth of the fourteen volumes collected under the title Péchés de vieillesse (sins of old age). On the other hand, among cellists, Bohuslav Martinů is particularly known for his “Variations on a Theme of Rossini,” scored for cello and piano, which he composed in 1942 when he was living in New York. Less known is the composition entitled “Hommage à Rossini,” composed by Jacques Offenbach, himself a cellist, for cello and orchestra.

All three of those pieces are on the Hommage à Rossini album, and they are the only original contributions. All of the others are arrangements prepared by Julian Riem, who also appears on the album as Gromes’ piano accompanist. For the three orchestral selections on the album Gromes is accompanied by the WDR Rundfunkorchester Köln, the “house orchestra” for WDR (West German broadcasting) in Cologne, conducted by Enrico Delamboye.

The best way to honor Rossini’s legacy is to recall his capacity for high spirits. I must confess that I have particular affection for the Martinů variations, which I first encountered on a recording by Janos Starker. Martinů knew exactly how to match Rossini’s upbeat qualities with a sassy rhetoric of his own that occasionally seems to reflect on “big city life” in New York.

Sadly, those high spirits never seem to come across in Gromes’ performances, whether she is playing original works or arrangements. This is particularly evident in the Offenbach “Hommage,” which amounts to an amusing reminder that selections we now tend to regard as “Rossini’s greatest hits” had the same popularity in Offenbach’s day. On the other hand the arrangements of three of the songs from the Les soirées musicales cycle are as flat as a bottle of champagne left open for a week. (Benjamin Britten was far more successful than Riem in capturing the spirit of these songs, but he was arranging them for full orchestra.)

This was clearly an album whose program was conceived with good intentions, but the road from intention to execution did not lead in a fortuitous direction.