Rossini – Can-Can from La Boutique Fantasque (String Quartet Score)

Rossini retired from a highly successful and lucrative career as an opera composer before he was 40 years of age, and although he lived almost another 40 years he wrote very little more music except for some short piano pieces of a dance-like nature that he called Sins of Old Age. In 1919 Respighi gathered many of these pieces together and orchestrated them for the ever-popular ballet La Boutique Fantasque. This string quartet is the first of two medleys arranged by Carlo Martelli that includes music from the ballet.

The opera from which this overture gets its title was Rossini's first great success in the field of opera buffa. The overture, now arranged for string quartet by Carlo Martelli, follows the customary pattern for Rossini of slow introduction followed by two skittish tunes with attendant long crescendo to tutti.

Rossini retired from a highly successful and lucrative career as an opera composer before he was 40 years old, and although he lived almost another 40 years he wrote very little more music except for some short piano pieces of a dance-like nature that he called Sins of Old Age. Some of these piano pieces were collected several decades after the composers death and were turned into a ballet by Ottorino Respighi - this is one of those pieces, now arranged by Carlo Martelli for string quartet.