Tarantella (from La Boutique fantasque)

Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)

arranged by Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936)

Tarantella (from La Boutique fantasque)

When Rossini retired from opera, after the first performance of Guillaume Tell in Paris in 1829, he by no means gave up composing. He wrote two large-scale religious works, the Stabat Mater and the Petite Messe solenelle, and dozens of not so serious songs and instrumental pieces, many of them collected under the title Péchés de ma Vieillesse (Sins of my Old Age). Just after the end of the First World War, realising the potential of these often witty and always tuneful little pieces, Ottorino Respighi proposed to Sergei Diaghilev that he should make a ballet score out of them - as proposal eagerly accepted by the impresario and his choreographer Léonide Massine. La Boutique fantasque, incorporating more than twenty Rossini pieces in arrangements by Respighi and set in a toyshop with a wide range of dolls to dance them, was first performed by the Ballets Russes at the Alhambra Theatre in 1919. One of the most brilliant dances of all - alongside such delights as a can-can parody of Offenbach and a mazurka for two Kings and two Queens from a pack of cards - is the breathlessly boisterous Tarantella for a pair of Neapolitan dolls.

Gerald Larner ©2004