Philip Gossett calls this 'a Rossinian curio cabinet'.
'A banquet made with leftovers from the Rossini kitchen' would do as well. Whatever the analogy, the art is as much in the assembling of the materials as in the materials themselves. The most familiar music – gleanings from Zelmira, Armida and La donna del lago – is to be found in the very first item, the overture to the Rossinian pastiche Robert Bruce, assembled for the Paris Opéra in 1846 by the composer Louis Niedermeyer. The other orchestral items are all echt-Rossini. The splendid Le Rendez-vous de chasse for four hunting horns and orchestra dates from the time of the composition of Guillaume Tell and could almost be a pendant to it. But the pillars of the anthology are the splendid Le Chant des Titans and three of Rossini's grand but little-known occasional hymns. The earliest of these is De l'Italieet de la France, written in 1825 for Charles X's coronation; the latest, written in 1867 when Rossini was 75, is the grandiose Hymne àNapoléon III à Son Vaillant Peuple. It all goes with a tremendous swing and the cannon-andchurch- bells end is spectacular. The voltage of Chailly's performances is unremittingly high, as is the attention to shading and fine detail.
This is conducting Toscanini or De Sabata would have been hard-pressed to better. The recordings, in Milan's new Auditorium di Milano, are also spectacularly good, vivid yet sensitive to the smallest detail.