Composers › Gioachino Rossini › Programme note
4 Songs from Les soirées musicales (1835)
La promessa
L’invito
La pesca
La regata veneziana
Although, like its companions in Les Soirées musicales, it was written after Rossini’s operatic career was over, the Metastasio setting La promessa demonstrates that the art of the elegant aria had not abandoned him. L’invito, on the other hand, is one of the several dance numbers in the collection, this one (a bolero) making what must have been an irresistible appeal to a developing Parisian taste for the Spanish idiom. The Metastasio duet La pesca, scored with Rossini’s consumate and long-practised skill in writing for female voices, is full-frontal seduction in vocal terms. As for La regata veneziana, there are two Rossini works under that title – a set of three solo songs in Venetian dialect, one of the “Sins of Old Age” committted to paper in the last 10 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.
From Gerald Larner’s files: “regata veneziana/duet”