3 Duets from Soirées musicales

La serenata: Mira, la blanca luna

La pesca: Già, la notte s’avvicina

La regata veneziana: Voga, o Tonio

More than half of Rossini’s duets are to be found in his Soirées musicales, one of the earliest of the many collections of short pieces he compiled during his long retirement in Paris after he had completed his last opera, Guillaume Tell, for that city in 1829. They are all settings for various solo voices or vocal ensembles of verses by either his friend Count Carlo Pepoli or the eighteenth-century poet Pietro Metastasio, author of the libretti of literally hundreds of operas. Although it was written originally for soprano and tenor, Mira, la blanca luna, a romantic Pepoli setting, is just as engaging in texture when sung by soprano and mezzo even if it is less operatic in effect. The Metastasio duet Già la notte s’avvicina, scored with Rossini’s consumate and long-practised skill in writing for female voices, is full-frontal seduction in vocal terms. There are two Rossini works under the title La regata veneziana - a set of three solo songs in Venetian dialect, one of the “Sins of Old Age” committted to paper in the last ten years of his life, and the duet Voga, o Tonio which was written perhaps thirty years earlier for the Soirées musicales. A characteristically witty response to satirical words by Pepoli with a suitably grotesque piano part, Voga, o Tonio is a none the less voluptuous example of vocal writing for that.