Classical home listening - from the salon to storm-tossed Aldeburgh

The Guardian 0

The 19th-century cellist-composer Alfredo Piatti is well-served in two recent recordings. Plus, Grimes on the Beach on the BBC

• This week we enter the salon. Please don’t leave. While not quite champing at the bit for CDs of music by Alfredo Piatti (1822-1901), a star of that 19th-century tradition, I was intrigued to receive two in quick succession. The Italian virtuoso cellist was a favourite of Queen Victoria, and also a composer. His 12 Caprices are central to the solo cello repertoire, but most of the short pieces in The Operatic Fantasies, Volume 2 (Meridian), performed by cellist Adrian Bradbury and pianist Oliver Davies, are world premieres. The duo have rescued manuscripts from the Donizetti Museum, Bergamo (also Piatti’s city of birth) and made performing editions of Piatti’s operatic paraphrases and fantasies from Lucia di Lamermoor, La favorita and more: virtuosic (and how) bonbons, brilliantly imitating the bel canto vocal technique, beloved of fashionable drawing rooms, and a route to getting to know opera in a pre-gramophone age.