Alessandro Scarlatti: Con eco d'amore

Featuring

Laurence Cummings
Elizabeth Watts
The English Concert
Alessandro Scarlatti

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Compositional Technique

Scarlatti often paired a singer with a solo instrument to reinforce an aria's emotional theme, frequently using the trumpet to illustrate love's battle or festive joy.

Composer Biography

Alessandro Scarlatti was extraordinarily productive as a composer of vocal music, leaving hundreds of motets, at least six hundred cantatas, and around thirty oratorios.

Composer Biography

Alessandro Scarlatti, father of the more famous Domenico Scarlatti, was born in Palermo in 1660, trained in Rome, and spent much of his life in Naples as maestro di cappella to the Spanish Viceroy.

Composition History

Alessandro Scarlatti meticulously counted his operas, claiming to have penned well over a hundred by the time he retired in 1721.

Composition History

Serenatas, like Scarlatti's Endimione e Cintia, were lucrative commissions for private festivities, shorter than operas, often allegorical, and usually unstaged.

Compositional Technique

Scarlatti's serenata 'Se geloso è il mio core' features a popular tradition of pitting virtuoso trumpeters against agile sopranos, exchanging and echoing phrases.

Critical Reception

Scarlatti's opera Mitridate Eupatore, a full tragedy with rich orchestration and complex harmony, flopped with the Venetian public who preferred lighter, more tuneful opera.