Aristotele e il Giavellotto Fatale

Radical, daring and extremely refined: that’s how Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach saw his new path for the Oratorio, after his father’s Passions had marked the climax of the baroque era. Encouraged by his godfather Telemann and liberated from the yoke of the capricious Frederick of Prussia, he found himself in Hamburg with an audience hungry for new music. And he brought them his oratorios, no longer in churches but in concert halls, where he demanded the listener’s undivided attention for sudden changes of mood and colour.

"EDEN is an invitation to return to our roots. It is an overture to engage with the sheer perfection of the world around us, to consider if we are connecting as profoundly as we can to the pure essence of our being. It is a clarion call to contemplate if our collective suffering isn't perhaps linked to the aching separation from something primal within and around us. This is a vivid musical exploration through the centuries to remember and to create a new EDEN from within." - Joyce DiDonato

The music on this recording was written by three of the great composers of the Baroque era and is undoubtedly of the highest quality. As a universal form of expression, music can overcome the boundaries of time, place and language. It has the unique power to speak to us, despite our distance from the time of its creation. Music can also permeate many a spiritual text, which seems to be far removed from our modern secular world, with emotional power and immediacy. If this happens, as here, with excellent interpreters such as the soprano Griet de Geyter and the ensemble Il gardellino, then this effect is intensified to a unique musical enjoyment.

The story of the liberation of the Israelites from their enslavement in Egypt, as told in the Book of Exodus, has often been set to music. The works by Telemann and Rolle recorded here are based on this subject and partly even on the same libretto. And yet these two composers, separated by only one generation, handle this topic in remarkably different ways.

The German soprano Anna Prohaska joins Alpha Classics for several recording projects. Her first recital brings together two superb African queens – Dido and Cleopatra – and follows them all over Europe during the first century of opera, from the 1640s to 1740. A firework display of arias, virtuosic and tragic by turns, written by the leading personalities of Baroque music (Cavalli, Handel, Purcell, Hasse) and composers still awaiting rediscovery suchas Sartorio, Graupner and the Venetian Castrovillari./quote]