Gioachino Rossini
Di piacer mi balza il cor

The composer from Pesaro, Rossini, definitely belongs in the top five of Italian classical music composers: he competes with Verdi, Puccini, Morricone, Vivaldi… and apologies to the absentees (Paganini, Bellini?).

And the organ has always been one of my favorite instruments. Leaving aside the Hammond pearls in rock music that I have always enjoyed, there are, for instance, these new churches that priests continue to build in city outskirts, thanks to the generous contributions of all of us, believers or not, which the Italian state allows them to collect. These modern Christian temples, as I said, are more or less all the same: as wide as they are long (or even wider), with a beautiful wooden roof, hut-style with exposed beams.

When I happen to enter them (baptisms, weddings, funerals involving my family or friends), I try to overlook the dreadful crusts depicting Christ, Madonnas, and saints that inevitably mar the walls, placed there by contemporary artists without the slightest talent, and I spend the time observing the people, perhaps the children with their innocent non-conformity to the place's rules.

But most importantly, I listen to the music: not those litanies devoid of minimum melodic ingenuity, attached to most of the prayers and invocations during services, but rather the singing of some good soprano (a rare occurrence that there is one), or (a more frequent occurrence) the vibrant notes of the organ, an instrument always present in churches, even if the organist is often missing!

Because the greatest virtue of these current wooden hut-like basilicas is how they resonate, their natural wooden and warm reverb, rich but not exaggerated like a cavern. Then a decent organist, not forced to just follow the non-existent melodic and harmonic quality of the musical litanies, free to sprinkle perhaps some Bach here and there, makes me enjoy it immensely.

Coming to the performance under review, here they are, these two well-known concert organists, male and female, Giuliana Maccaroni and Martino Pòrcile, side by side, him pushing the mid-low registers and her the mid-highs of a marvelous machine like the Vegezzi-Bossi from 1897, duly restored in recent times, proudly displayed in Cuneo, in the neo-Gothic Church of the Sacred Heart, built during those years there. The duo's performance is dated 2019.

The album's repertoire is filled with organ transpositions of Overtures, the initial instrumental sections of classical Operas, performed in theaters with the curtain still closed, after which it opens, and the singers arrive. Personally, since I can't tolerate much the operatic genre with its banal librettos, always incomprehensible words, virtuosic warbles, and so on, they are my favorite part, often containing the deepest and most solemn motifs played at full force.

The eight tracks of the album skim over the rich series of compositions by the Pesaro master: the The Barber of Seville and William Tell, The Thieving Magpie, and Semiramide are not missing, but transpositions of Overtures from his later Parisian period are also present, complete with titles and librettos in French.

Among all, the organ rendition of the marvelous intro of The Thieving Magpie clearly stands out, not for nothing placed in pole position on the tracklist, one of my favorite classical pages, in which Rossini showcases all his melodic, harmonic, structural, and dynamic talent, alternating the powerful main theme where the organ basses played by Pòrcile have great devastating power over heart, brain, and stomach, with the more rarefied or fast parts where Maccaroni excels with agility and expressiveness. This Overture almost seems conceived for the organ, this version excites me more than the rendition by the great orchestra.

The sound capture in the Piedmontese church is excellent. You can even clearly hear the tlocks of the timbre changes performed by the assistant between different sections of the execution. Great and immortal Italian music.