Arpeggiata Yarantella

A hymn to nature envisioned by the unparalleled Christina Pluhar, featuring the extraordinary Swedish mezzo-soprano Malena Ernman, in a program that embraces the four winds! This is a unique blend that L'Arpeggiata, under Pluhar's direction, masterfully creates—drawing from the rumblings of the sea, sunny canarios, cuckoos and nightingales, whispers and tempests. With a fusion of baroque repertoire, traditional music, and improvisations, it promises a vibrant celebration of vocal and instrumental artistry, all under the banner of the nourishing earth.

Himmelsmusik (‘heavenly music’), a programme of sacred songs and cantatas by German composers of the 17th century, presents a striking contrast with the previous Erato album from Christina Pluhar and her ensemble L’Arpeggiata: Händel Goes Wild.

L'Arpeggiata's previous recordings have blended popular or folk-inspired elements with music of the Baroque in striking and imaginative ways. 'All'Improviso' takes this melting-pot approach even further, combining the Baroque ostinato bass with improvisatory techniques from both the historically aware stream of 21st-century music-making and of jazz through the participation of the clarinettist Gianluigi Trovesi.

2009 release from L'Arpeggiata, the French-based ensemble directed by Austrian-born harpist and lutenist Christina Pluhar. L'Arpeggiata has made a speciality of exploring and exploiting the close links between Baroque repertoire and the traditional music of the Latin world and its characteristic forms such as the tarantella, the folia or the canario. On Via Crucis, 'the way of the Cross', the focus is on the pervasive presence of religious feeling in Southern Europe. The Passion of Christ evokes the same fervour in composers such as Giovanni Felice Sances (1600-1679) or Tarquinio Merula (1594-1665) - both active in northern Italy – as it does in the streets of Naples or the villages of Corsica. The two main works in the collection are Sance's extraordinary Stabat Mater and Merula's Hor ch'e tempo di dormire, in which the Virgin Mary lulls her baby to sleep while weeping for his future suffering and both enthrall the listener with a basso ostinato and hypnotic swaying rhythms.

Tenor Rolando Villazón, music ensemble L’Arpeggiata and its founder-director Christina Pluhar’s upcoming album Orfeo son io is based on a conceptual programme devised by Pluhar. Inspired by Greek mythology, the album takes in works by Monteverdi and his contemporaries as well as by Gluck, Gardel and Bonfá. Villazón first worked with Christina Pluhar and L’Arpeggiata when he made his role debut as Monteverdi’s Orfeo in a concert performance at the Musikfest Bremen in 2016. The success of their collaboration resulted in numerous other performances around Europe. In 2021, the artists reunited to premiere Pluhar’s Orfeo son io programme, again at the Musikfest Bremen, and again leading to further acclaimed concerts together.

Between 2000 and 2005, L’Arpeggiata and Christina Pluhar opened up new ways in the rediscovery and interpretation of the Baroque repertoires. The five recordings made for Alpha are some of the greatest disc successes in these repertoires and still stand as references, thanks to the exceptional quality of their artistic and sound achievement.

Christina Pluhar, L’Arpeggiata and eight guest singers explore the musical highways and byways of Naples, the most intoxicating and idiosyncratic of Italy’s large cities. Alla Napoletana, a double album, expresses the city’s mercurial personality in music from the 17th to the 20th centuries, embracing the operatic style of the so-called Neapolitan School, which rose to prominence in the late 1700s, and popular songs and dances. Among them are several examples of the tarantella, the lively, sometimes frenzied dance that epitomises southern Italy.

It's not easy to pinpoint precisely what makes Christina Pluhar and L'Arpeggiata's performances of Baroque music, particularly Monteverdi, so extraordinary and distinctive, even in a time – the early 21st century – when (pardon the oxymoron) exceptionally fine recordings of this repertoire are the rule rather than the exception. One element may be the inventiveness of her realizations of the continuo part.

Bright and inventive, the early-music vocal and instrumental group l’Arpeggiata—steered by intrepid theorbist and baroque harpist Christina Pluhar—takes us on an unapologetically idiosyncratic journey through Monteverdi. The Renaissance composer’s avant-garde tendencies are by turns revealed and exploited, most aggressively in the jazzy basso continuo cum walking bass of Ohimè ch’io cado and the swing treatment of the celebrated Chiome d’oro, but also, more subtly, in the gentle rubato of Pur ti miro, the light syncopation of Damigella tutta bella, and the adult-contemporary/Buena Vista Social Club–infused ostinato of Amor. Even seemingly familiar Renaissance fare (Sinfonie & Moresca) receives a late infusion of slightly alien percussion.