Gioachino Rossini - La Pietra Del Paragone - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Antonio Soler is the 17th century's Spanish composer with the greatest international projection. His fame is due to the celebrated sonatas for harpsichord and his chamber music. However, Soler also produced an extensive oeuvre of vocal music thanks to the more than thirty years he spent at the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, where he was organist and maestro de capilla. This album gathers a carefully selected group of compositions in Latin written for two choruses and instrumental ensemble, some of which have never been recorded. Based on the technical procedures involved in polychoral writing, these works are made up of imposing choral sections- of both homophonic and contrapuntal textures- and sections for soloists with either a cantabile or virtuoso character closer to a theatrical style, all of which shows his mastery throughout an admirable stylistic spectrum. This pioneering initiative reveals the abundant imagination, the vocal writing skill and the ample scope of expressive resources employed by the great Catalan musician.

La pietra del paragone (The Touchstone), a story of three rival women and their pursuit of marriage to Count Asdrubale, is unique in the sense that no other opera of Rossini's has been so highly praised in the literature on the subject and yet so seldom performed. The better known Il barbiere di Siviglia brought a series of stage successes without comparison, and so shaped the fate of La pietra. That it could not be counted among the first rank of Rossini operas meant that for nearly two centuries it had no place, not even a modest one, on the stage. It does, however, thoroughly deserve it's reputation and marks a unique phase of Rossini's development as a master of opera buffa. His genius for melody and sparkling, witty orchestration are already apparent in this relatively early work.

Rossini wrote Semiramide in the winter of 1822/23 for La Fenice of Venice. The libretto is based on Voltaire's drama Semiramis, written by the French philosopher and scholar in 1748. In some respects a conclusive opera, Semiramide contains traditional elements alongside innovative ones. Semiramide summarizes and completes Rossini's serious arc and is paradigmatic of all that would follow.