Lina Tur Bonet & Musica Alchemica Antonio Vivald

Based on a ponderous libretto by Metastasio (who defined his own work as “stellar”) Leonardo Vinci’s dramma per musica was premiered in Venice in 1726 and was triumphantly acclaimed. Since then, Siroe, Re di Persia was put to music by composers such as Vivaldi, Handel, Hasse, and Galuppi, to mention just a few. The story uses some of the elements of the plot of Partenope, almost as if it were a sequel moved to Persia. Siroe’s plot revolves around a family mystery mingled with passions, traitors en travesti, fatherly affection and filial honesty that echoes Shakespeare’s King Lear. Performed in concert version at Teatro San Carlo of Naples in 2018, this rare opera was chosen to open the theatre’s 281st season. Conductor Antonio Florio , specialist of the Neapolitan Baroque repertoire, revised the score.

A very recent 2020 release by Irish label Diatribe Records, A Way A Lone A Last features Australian flautist Lina Andonovska in a tour de force collection of World Premiere recordings. The album is comprised of five works commissioned by and dedicated to Andonovska composed by Irish composers Barry O’Halpin, Nick Roth, Donnacha Dennehy and Judith Ring.

There are very few musicians who dare to expand their artistic vision with every new project as Swedish vocalist-songwriter-composer Lina Nyberg. Aerials, is the her second installment in a trilogy of albums that offers her unique perspective about the world, the elements and the music itself. Nyberg began the trilogy with the double album The Sirenades (Hoob, 2014), that featured her songs composed for her quintet and the Norrbotten Big Band, sketching poetic images of cyber-seas, monsters and waves. On Aerials Nyberg sings of avians real and mythological birds and raising her glance a bit higher and adding images of pilots, winds and astronauts.

These albums aims to provide a selection of some of the most representative classic of world music, as well as a selection of recent successes, universalized in version "World". This denomination, we have baptized for the occasion as "La Musica De Los Dioses" (The Music of the Gods), provides a spectrum of influences, whose origins are in the most remote places on earth. Sounds, percussion and voices of the Amazon jungles, islands of Borneo and Indonesia or multiple regions of Africa converge here with influences from very different cultures and current rates.

Countertenor Tim Mead presents Beauteous Softness, a programme containing restrained yet profoundly moving songs by seventeenth-century English composers such as Purcell, Blow, Humfrey and Webb, in collaboration with La Nuova Musica and David Bates. The album also showcases the rich musical context that provided the foundation from which Purcell rose to prominence.