Sunday Live: Recital of Italian Baroque Music

The broadcast performance premieres excerpts from Italian baroque pieces alongside well-known works of Henry Purcell and Domenico Scarlatti. Arias from larger works were chosen to introduce them to a non-specialist audience. These works were found during manuscript research into Italian music.The two Scarlatti arias, performed probably for the first time this century, situate the singer in nature, a theme that provided composers then a rich field for symbolic representation.The cantabile aria of the cantata reflects a recurrent but unfamiliar quality of Scarlatti's style. Text and music represent the empathy between singer and the mythical pathos of the nightingale's song, seen to express the longing for freedom and linked to the noble woman in contemporary European society. The opera aria, found in an aria book in Naples, features Scarlatti's signature 'fade-out' ending in a non Da Capo aria form: a dialogue between singer and the breeze (love's accomplice). The theme for the arias was the voice in nature, including arias by Alessandro Scarlatti on the theme of the nightingale as human companion, and ‘Be silent breezes’, the final aria of a 1695 opera. The inclusion of the nightingale theme has opened the way for further exploration, based on newly edited duet and solo Scarlatti works.