Gioachino Rossini's Pêches de Vieillesse (Sins of Old Age) are often recorded in ones and pairs, but there's something to be said for recording them all, as German pianist Stefan Irmer is doing in the series of which this disc forms the seventh volume. Taken as a group, these piano pieces emerge as something more than the trifles that even Rossini sometimes represented them as. The works on this album, far from being salon entertainment, are in the main unlike anything else ever written for the piano. The shorter ones are ...
Read More
Gioachino Rossini's Pêches de Vieillesse (Sins of Old Age) are often recorded in ones and pairs, but there's something to be said for recording them all, as German pianist Stefan Irmer is doing in the series of which this disc forms the seventh volume. Taken as a group, these piano pieces emerge as something more than the trifles that even Rossini sometimes represented them as. The works on this album, far from being salon entertainment, are in the main unlike anything else ever written for the piano. The shorter ones are something like harmonic demonstrations, several of them using putatively Chinese scales (it would be a worthwhile research project to figure out exactly what he was hearing, which seems to have involved a whole-tone scale); they consist of harmonized ascending and descending scales, or sequences of harmonies that can generate the tones of the chromatic scale. Some of the titles are so odd that you wonder whether Satie might have taken the set for inspiration; track 1, a depiction of a...
Read Less
