Damien Teo

There is a duality at play between the repetition of recording and the spontaneity and unpredictability of duende - and to summon duende, the process had to be as free and fluid as possible: all sessions built up to a final complete ‘recital’-take to capture the spirit of live creation.

On The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania, Damien Jurado gathers up ten stories of people determined not to be broken by their dire circumstances. “The world is a liar, the stars are a must,” he sings over brushed drums, a circling bassline, and acoustic guitar on “Helena,” which opens his 17th album, the first release from Damien’s own Maraqopa Records. Dire circumstances have long been fixtures of Jurado’s songs, which are filled with ghosts, killers, cruel lovers, and the occasional UFO cult or false messiah. But here, the scenes are earthy, drawn from ordinary but no less immense calamities: hurricanes moving toward town, strained connections, amnesiacs in the front yard. On The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania, Jurado pulls the curtains shut, blocking out “the light now embarrassed and afraid of the dark,” as he sings on “Tom,” one of the album’s haunting numbers, only to throw them open the exact moment sunshine needs to come flooding in.

Accompanied by his ensemble Le Banquet Céleste, the countertenor Damien Guillon places his voice at the service of a programme of vocal pieces by the German Baroque composer Philipp Heinrich Erlebach, a large part of whose output was destroyed in a fire at Rudolstadt Castle in 1735. Among the works that have come down to us are the two collections Harmonische Freude musikalischer Freunde, containing respectively fifty and twenty-five arias for one to four solo voices, instrumental ensemble and basso continuo. Most of the German texts of these pieces depict humankind at the mercy of an unpredictable and volatile destiny.

A composer who led a dissolute life and ended up stabbed to death in Genoa, Stradella nevertheless left a distinctive stamp on the history of music. He is situated at the intersection of several stylistic paths and periods, at the crossroads between opera and sacred drama, since his output, and especially San Giovanni Battista (St John the Baptist), marks the encounter of the great Roman oratorio inherited from Carissimi with the Venetian opera of Cavalli. Stradella is also close to the next generation, that of Scarlatti and Handel. His music is characterised by liveliness, expressiveness and profound humanity. Although San Giovanni Battista enjoyed genuine success when it was premiered in 1675, it was only in 1949 that the work was exhumed from the libraries where its score lay slumbering. That event took place in Perugia, and the role of Salome was sung by Maria Callas.

Suite for Modigliani is a homage to a passion that clarinetist Matteo Pastorino has felt since childhood, his passion for Amedeo Modigliani.