Italian concert programme — Verdi & Rossini

Vincenzo Bellini (1801-35)

Vega luna che inargenti (c1830)

Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)

In solitaria stanza (1835)

Stornello (1869)

Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)

La Promessa (c1835)

L’invito: Bolero (c1835)

While Schubert’s canzoni are less interesting in their harmonies and their piano writing than the Lieder he was writing at the same time, they are positively adventurous in these respects in comparison with most of the songs of Bellini. But Bellini’s interest was in flattering the voice with a seductive melodic line. In his setting of an unkown poet’s Vega luna che inargenti the vocal line is so elegantly poised that anything but the most conventional change of harmony or the most modest of keyboard figuration would surely upset it. Much the same could be said, incidentally, of his version of Vitorelli’s Guarda, che bianca luna which remained an attractive proposition to Italian composers at least until Verdi set it as a trio in 1838. Verdi’s setting of Vitorelli’s In solitaria stanza starts as a song but towards the end - from “Salvate, o Dei pietosi” onwards - develops into an aria as expressive as anything in any of his early operas. Stornello, his last song, written more than thirty years later, is a brilliant example of mature wit with a piano accompaniment as vividly characterised as the vocal part.

The two Rossini songs both come from Les soirées musicales, a collection of eight songs and four duets published in Paris in 1835. Although, like its companions, it was written after his 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.