Sung Baroque

Everything (re)starts with the film Peau d’Âne (Donkeyskin) with its medieval fluorescence and its pop art style. Striking images, similar to those in Peter Greenway’s Murders in an English Garden. Each of these baroque films is accompanied by irresistible soundtracks recorded by Michel Legrand, a student of Nadia Boulanger and subsequently Michael Nymann who’d revisited Purcell’s glamorous ostinatos in the early 1980s.

Baroque music is marked by its sometimes frenzied, sometimes languid rhythms, by chiaroscuro and shimmer. This is thanks to the colour produced by instruments from the period, where violins were strung with guts, and oboes and bassoons were lovingly crafted. But the king of these instruments was the voice, especially the artificial and fascinating voice of the legendary castrati. Countertenor Franco Fagioli has all the range of a mature man’s voice, as well as the tones of a child’s. At what a price came the original castrati’s voice! The sweet hell of music...  

This voice that carries beyond gender marries with everything. From the psaltery, which arrived from the East via Venice and which so fascinated Vivaldi and Caldara; to the bassoon or the chalumeau, very much in use in Bohemia, a land of incomparable instrumentalists who made their reputations in the Vienna of the Hapsbergs. Each and every one served the excess of passions and no one captured this spirit better than Handel. The lifeblood of baroque passion flows from him. Love, hatred, jealousy and despair are pushed to their extreme.

In the 17th and 18th centuries people danced brightly and fiercely, everywhere and often. The theatre was greatly loved especially the news style of performance, the opera. It was the cinema of the age, full of storms, stage effects and hits for the pop stars of the day. Vinci’s “Artaserse”, which closes this playlist, remains the ultimate example. Close your eyes: in Naples a star is born...