Music

Something lighter for the holidays. (Yes, still going here in the sleepy land of Oz.) Number one son is learning the old standard, so I passed on the story of Nicolai Malko’s bet with the young Shostakovitch: 100 roubles if he could orchestrate Tea for Two after listening to a recording just once. Here’s the result – it took Shostakovitch 45 minutes.

Naxos has a buoyant CD of this as part of a program of his early light music. A touch fulsome compared to Chailly’s but as usual, very good value.

Yes, it’s time again for the Wordability highlights of the year, that consoling list which doesn’t include anything too recent.  The music award this year has been easy: Rossini’s Il Viaggio di Reims on DGG, Claudio Abbado, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, the Prague Philharmonic Chorus and a cast like a fleet of Rolls-Royces.

Rossini wrote it for Paris to celebrate the coronation of Charles X in 1825. It was given four times, then withdrawn. For 150 years it was thought the complete score had been lost. (About half the music was re-purposed for  Le Comte Ory.) But three separate manuscript discoveries and some careful editing restored the whole. This 1985 recording, based on performances at Pesaro, is the work’s first. Charles X, by the way, was a reactionary so boneheaded that he brought on the 1830 revolution.

It’s first-rate Rossini. There are samples of the work on YouTube, from both the 1984 Pesaro performances, a 1992 performance again conducted by Abbado with much the same cast. and an Opus Arte video of another production.

Here’s the Pesaro version of the incomparable Sextet (the tenor who leads off is Franco Araiza).

This is the encore of the finale, this time from Berlin 1992. Watch ten virtuosi deliberately skating on thin ice.

And if you want more of Silvia McNair (who doesn’t?)