Xavier Sabata / Vespres d'Arnadí / Dani Espasa L'ALESSANDRO AMANTE

The irresistible and warm voice of counter-tenor Xavier Sabata never ends to bewitch us in his new medley of jubilant baroque arias. Alexander The Great inspired him the theme his new album: Porpora, Händel, Bononcini and many other composers were seduced by this character who mingled the strength of the Emperor and the sensibility of a man.

Xavier Sabata focuses on that multifaceted feeling that keeps nourishing music, especially baroque opera. With the Spanish conductor Dani Espasa and his ensemble Vespres d’Arnadí, the singer performs a tailor-made programme: the new exciting chapter of a unique voice and a fascinating artist.

Blandine Staskiewicz / Les Accents / Thibault Noally ORATORIO

Since its foundation in 2014, Thibault Noally’s ensemble Les Accents brings to life rare works from the Italian Baroque era: in particular the vocal repertoire of the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Their new record features unpublished extracts of oratorios. Born at the same time and made of the same theatrical stuff as his opera brother, the oratorio, a lyric and dramatic work without staging, also moves the crowds! And its heroines Athalie and Judith have the same temper as their operatic counterparts.The virtuoso arias of Caldara, Scarlatti (father) or Porpora performed by the mezzo-soprano Blandine Staskiewicz, full of baroque ornaments and jubilant flights, also testify to the instrumental ardor of the genre: the dramatic effects of the orchestra, the alternation of allegros and adagios, and the various of playing modes marry the movements of the passions of these characters with great intensity.

Nuria Rial / Artemandoline SOSPIRI D'AMANTI

With their ensemble Artemandoline, formed in 2001, Juan Carlos Muñoz and Mari Fe Pavón chose to go back to the original documents in order to the establish the true pedigree of this incomparable family of instruments. They have made a major contribution to launching a movement to encourage musical freshness and rigour. A better understanding of the compositions, closer study of the early treatises, the playing styles, the musical environment of the glorious era of the mandolin, leads to better appreciation of Baroque music, which itself became over time a mode of thought and action.

Searching for early mandolins, working on the manuscripts, hunting down early treatises, exploring the iconography: these are the means by which, for more than ten years now, the musicians of Artemandoline have sought to do fuller justice to the works of Scarlatti, Vivaldi, Weiss, and their contemporaries. The success of this approach based on a return to the sources, which constitutes the most important development in the history of the interpretation of ‘serious’ music in the course of the twentieth century, has been made possible by the cooperation of many protagonists – musicians, but also concert organisers, recording producers, publishers, musicologists, and instrument makers. 

To ensure that music composed in the past does not sound like mere ‘early music’ in the present, the performers must manage to be sufficiently free, spontaneous, anticipative and astonished in their intimate act of creation and the newness it engenders. Juan Carlos Muñoz and Mari Fe Pavón spend their lives searching out and reviving forgotten masterpieces of the mandolin repertory. They are not content with simply presenting their finds like ‘musical archaeologists’, but endeavour to transmit them to the wider public by means of the essential act of communication between interpreters, composers, and listeners.