Concert – Leonardo García-Alarcón’s Personal Picks

A small opera initially intended for private audiences, Acis and Galatea was Handel’s most performed work during his lifetime. This masterpiece; miniature drama, pastoral or mask has undergone numerous reworkings. It offers a brilliant synthesis of English and Italian styles, with da capo arias and a major contribution to the chorus. The argument comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which had already inspired Lully to write an opera (1686), and boldly blends comedy and tragedy. Leonardo García-Alarcón leads his Cappella Mediterranea (37 musicians) and the Chœur de Chambre de Namur (12 choristers) from the organ in this music that Mozart himself admired, to the point of making a German version.

Georg Friedrich Haendel
Acis & Galatea (1718)
HWV 49a/49b – semi-opera in two acts

Sunday 18 May at 11am – Château

Love, drama and betrayal under the Sicilian sun.

Composers of the Baroque period had made an art of recycling. They happily borrowed, arranged and transformed the works of others, navigating from learned forms to popular traditions with a freedom that classicism lost its taste for. Trained by the most rigorous European masters, Leonardo García-Alarcón has nonetheless retained the fantasy and love of melodrama of his native Argentina. Here, with his musicians and singers of the Cappella Mediterranea, he takes up the torch of pastiche, which consists of creating a new work by juxtaposing and reworking existing pieces by different composers. Roland de Lassus, Sigismondo d’India and Alessandro Scarlatti have all given a hand to anonymous tarantellas and lamenti, whose vitality, emotion and violence are second to none. And the eyes of the audience in southern Italy, three centuries ago, follow the misfortunes of poor Cecilia, whose melancholy Calabrian song permeates the whole drama…