What accounts for the spate of recordings of the piano music from late in Gioacchino Rossini's life? A classical music audience more oriented than before toward connoisseurship? The works heard here and elsewhere are subtle things. Or just a fuller realization of the late piano music as an important phase of Rossini's career? These pieces were not occasional doodlings; they are drawn from a large body of pieces that range from abstract experiments to trifles to large Beethovenian essays. Each of the new recordings has its own perspective, this one coming from the use of a Pleyel piano purchased by Rossini himself in 1846. The booklet offers a good deal of detail about its construction, but the bottom line is that the piano's sound is modest in dimensions, immediate and highly differentiated, with a sharp difference in sound among registers and among kinds of articulation. The piano does the impish quality of these works well. They pivot at unexpected places and have a kind of wizardry whose intimate qualities are picked up nicely here. Rossini casts an eye back over keyboard music going back to Mozart, going down little byways the original composers wouldn't have thought of and captioning the works with funny titles that would have been worthy of Satie 40 or 50 years later. Pianist
Flavio Ponzi is beautifully attuned to the humor of these works. He offers an "appendix" consisting of alternate interpretations of two of the pieces, the Impromptu Tarantellisé and the exquisite Pétit Caprice (Style Offenbach), whose tripping rhythm conceals a wealth of harmonic art. The alternate versions fool with the rhythms. This device may seem self-indulgent, but
Ponzi backs it up with a novel complement -- an altered microphone technique that effectively sets the appendix apart as a kind of departing new perspective. This is an essential purchase for those bitten by the bug of Rossini's "sins of old age."