Rossini - Opera Overtures [Chailly-National Philharmonic Orchestra]
I played disc 1 walking on the way to Church, and disc 2 on the way back, a nice experience, it's finally getting warmer at last, it's the last month of Spring, and Summer is around the corner, the ice cold Pepsi was refreshing, and so too were these 14 Overtures by Rossini, in some ways i really feel that Rossini would have done better if he didn't become an Opera Composer, and instead concentrated on Orchestral and Chamber music, he's a master at creating complex rhythms, a veritable gearbox of speed changes, and different motor rhythms, Chailly goes beyond the ordinary one disc of the most famous, and creates a second disc, and therefore is forced to pick some of the periphery Overtures, Torvaldo E Dorliska is a great example, i haven't heard it anywhere else, and what an inventive Overture it is, full of unique ideas, i played this set last year also [3rd July 2011].
Riccaro Chailly is an Italian Conductor, born in 1953, he's now 59, and he recorded these two discs separately in 1981 [disc 1] and 1984 [disc 2].
Again it's disc one that i found best, especially Overtures 4-7 & 12, and it's the first of these four that was the best La Scala Di Seta [The Ladder Of Silk or The Silken Ladder], it's an Overture that lasts roughly 6 minutes, as in almost all of Rossini's Overtures, there's an introductory phase at the beginning [0:00-1:25], which uses extensive use of the oboe [0:13-0:31 & 0:52-1:25], i like the way that Rossini explodes the whole thing in a rhythmic forte [1:53+], and it's the oboes that end up chattering away in the mix [2:24-28 & 2:33-2:37], a really lovely effect, and the woodwind right after chatter back and forth [2:37-2:45], the way that Rossini adds these voices out of the melee is wonderful, of course what goes around comes around, and Rossini's oboes come back again for a second dose [3:23+], and the explosion comes back again, though in a different key [4:26+], the woodwind chatter is lovely a second time around [5:07-5:14], six minutes of pure dynamite!.
Here's Lanfranco Marcelletti conducting La Scala Di Seta on YouTube.
