Diego Dusaro

Juan Diego Flórez' passion for Latin American music started at an early age, when he was still a child. It was a deep and lasting passion and his initial encounter with it turned into a lifelong passion. “I grew up with vals criollos, Marineras, boleros, rancheras and tangos, magnificent songs from Latin America,” says tenor star Juan Diego Flórez. Now, he documents his love for Latin American music on a very personal CD.

“Refractio” is a project that generates a dialogue between the performance of a work and an improvisation in response. Just as light transforms its appearance when it changes medium, the musical work is also diluted within the improvisation, which in a certain way deconstructs what the listener has just heard and builds it up again using a contemporary language.

On her second PENTATONE album Maria & Maddalena, star soprano Francesca Aspromonte explores the Two Marys in oratorios by Lulier, Bononcini, Leopoldo I d’Asburgo, Caldara, Perti, Handel and Scarlatti, partly in new editions, documenting the extremely bloom of the genre in the years around 1700. She performs these works together with violinist Boris Begelman as well as the seasoned players of I Barocchisti under the baton of the eminent Diego Fasolis. Traditionally seen as two feminine opposites, with far-reaching moral implications, Aspromonte brings the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene together as two beautiful and strong women who turned their lives upside down by making the choice to dedicate themselves completely to an ideal. Her interpretation of these exceptional pieces explores all the emotions of the Two Marys, constituting a fascinating and profoundly moving portrait of what it means to be a woman.