★★★★
If someone discovered that Chopin had written an opera, you’d expect the world and its auntie to lead a stampede on the box-office. What, then, if the composer of the most successful opera of all time was found to be a secret composer of piano miniatures?
Georges Bizet’s Carmen is the most stable of operatic staples. Bizet died at 36 with not much else to his name. The profusion of pieces on this engaging album by the Italian pianist Roberto Prosseda offers glimpses of what might have been. An 1868 set of Chromatic Variations sounds like a gym workout for a budding Richard Wagner. Songs of the Rhine (1865) falls midway between Schumann and Brahms. A Grande Valse de Concert is embryonic Offenbach. The best pieces are a pair of nocturnes and four caprices that might easily be mistaken for Frederic Chopin.
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None of this strains the brain. In fact, it sounds rather easy to play. My fingers are itching to try, though I suspect Prosseda’s elegance conceals much of the difficulty involved. As a listener, you hardly notice the 80 minutes slipping by. This album is the ultimate in easy listening, with an occasional tweak of the ear.
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