After a first album dedicated to Weill, Zemlinsky and Korngold (AJ 0272), Kate Lindsey explores here her other repertoire of choice, the music of the eighteenth century. In partnership with Jonathan Cohen and Arcangelo, she has recorded three cantatas focusing on the myth of Ariadne, abandoned on the island of Naxos after helping Thesus kill the Cretan Minotaur by giving him a ball of thread so that he could find his way back through the labyrinth. Alessandro Scarlatti’s Ebra d’amor fuggia (1707) relates Ariadne’s flight, ‘drunk with love’, alongside Theseus, for whom she expresses her tenderness in the magnificent aria ‘Pur ti stringo’. The same year, the young Handel composed his cantata Ah crudel, nel pianto mio, this time with an anonymous abandoned lover as the subject. In 1789, Joseph Haydn also turned to Ariadne, in a cantata for which several orchestrations exist. The one recorded here is by Sigismund Neukomm, Haydn’s pupil between 1797 and 1804. Three faces of disappointed love, brought to passionate life by the mezzo-soprano.
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Reviews
Nominee in Recital category
Gramophone Classical Music Awards 2020
Choral and Song Choice
Performance ***** Recording *****
"Ardent, brilliant, stately: mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey probes the inner states of the mythical Cretan princess Ariadne..."
Berta Joncus - BBC Music magazine - April 2020
***** Coup de Cœur
Jeremie Bigorie - Classica magazine (France) - March 2020
"... The playing of Arcangelo under Jonathan Cohen is typically high-quality, and often heartbreakingly attendant to the drama. This is a lovely programme, expertly performed and full of touching feeling and imagination."
Lindsay Kemp - Gramophone magazine - February 2020
"... The American mezzo Kate Lindsey sings this [Ariadne at Naxos ] and cantatas by Scarlatti and Hendel (based on music for the opera Agrippina) with vehemence in recitative and plush tone in the several arias."
Hugh Canning - The Sunday Times (Culture magazine) - 2 February 2020
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