Italy's Alessandro Stradella Consort, after recording works by Alessandro Scarlatti and other Italian Baroque composers, have turned back to their namesake with several impressive discs. Stradella's life was a dramatic one, containing sex and violence in equal measure, but some of the genres in which he worked have less prime-time appeal. This disc presents chamber vocal music Stradella wrote for his aristocratic patrons -- semi-dramatic works whose texts are both talky and stilted. Amanti, olà, olà is a setting of a sort ...
Read More
Italy's Alessandro Stradella Consort, after recording works by Alessandro Scarlatti and other Italian Baroque composers, have turned back to their namesake with several impressive discs. Stradella's life was a dramatic one, containing sex and violence in equal measure, but some of the genres in which he worked have less prime-time appeal. This disc presents chamber vocal music Stradella wrote for his aristocratic patrons -- semi-dramatic works whose texts are both talky and stilted. Amanti, olà, olà is a setting of a sort of Platonic disputation on the nature of Love, featuring as characters Beauty, Courtesy, Fancy, Love itself, Discipline, Disenchantment, and two Academicians. The smaller three-part Chi resiste al Dio bendato treads similar territory, but Stradella doesn't let these abstract texts slow him down. His treatment of his small instrumental ensemble is extraordinarily atmospheric, and his moods are matched step for step by the Alessandro Stradella Consort under Estevan Velardi. Stradella...
Read Less
