Riccardo Chailly has had a recording contract with Decca for 30 years, which has followed him through his association with four orchestras. It began with the Berlin Radio Symphony in the 1980s, then 16 years with the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Leipzig Gewandhaus from 2005 to 2015, and now the orchestra at La Scala, Milan, where he took over formally as music director in January. Chailly no doubt intends to raise the profile of the orchestra in the concert hall as well as in the opera house itself. His first recording with them makes a neat bridge between the two, as well as signalling his determination to promote a much wider range of Italian music than the house has programmed in recent years.
The 16 orchestral pieces included here are taken from operas that received their premieres in Milan; all except the two by Leoncavallo were first performed at La Scala. Chailly has resisted the temptation to present them chronologically, preferring to vary and contrast the mood of the numbers, but it’s still a fascinating forage through almost 100 years of Italian music, from the earliest, the overture to Rossini’s La Pietra del Paragone, first performed in 1812 (and later reused to begin his better known Tancredi), up to Puccini’s Madama Butterfly of 1904. The intermezzo from Butterfly is one of only four pieces on the disc that could be described as well known, together with the overture to Bellini’s Norma, the intermezzo from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci and the Dance of the Hours from Ponchielli’s La Gioconda.
Even the two Verdi items that begin the disc are not particularly familiar: the overture to Un Giorno di Regno (listed here under the original title of the libretto, Il Finto Stanislao) and the prelude to the third-act trio of I Lombardi. Other rarities include the overture to Donizetti’s Ugo, Conte di Parigi, Giordano’s looming prelude to the second act of his Siberia (with its motto from the Song of the Volga Boatmen), first performed in 1903, more Leoncavallo (two preludes from I Medici of 1893), and the majestic music that opens Boïto’s Mefistofele.
There’s nothing very substantial, but it all makes a fine workout for the Filarmonica della Scala. There may be room for improvement here and there in the orchestra, but the recording suggests that most sections are already in fine shape – the brass is particularly impressive in the Boïto extract.
Chailly has always been a superb Puccini conductor, and predictably it’s the music of the last decades of the 19th century that shows him at his best here. The Rossini and Donizetti are, of course, neat and tidy enough, but they don’t hold the attention in the way that his performances of Giordano, Ponchielli and Leoncavallo do.
