Dedicating an album to the dark side of the Lied might seem inappropriate in these times of Covid, climate change and refugee crises, but as a mezzo-soprano Olivia has always been drawn to the darker roles in opera, the sad arias in oratorio and the deep laments in song. After our recent recording ('Dirty Minds'), which focused on 'la petite mort', it seemed a natural progression to turn our attention to 'la grande mort'! Darkness in the outside world and the inner self has always been - alongside Love - one of the chief themes of vocal music, and compositions and songs about death are legion during every period of musical history.

Giovanni Domenico Ferrandini (1709-1791) came to the Munich Court with his father already in 1722; initially active there as an oboist, he was appointed Kammer-Compositore by Elector Karl Albrecht in 1732 before being named Director of Chamber Music and appointed to the Electoral Council in 1737. As a contemporary of far better-known masters such as Galuppi, Pergolesi and Gluck, he developed his very own variant of the gallant style: highly expressive, with a dense string sound, idiosyncratic in its melody and rhythm whilst remaining extremely sensitively written for the singers.

Johann Georg Reutter (1708-1772) worked in Vienna as a court composer and gained a reputation early on as a skilled creator of oratorios and works of music drama. With this CD the mezzo-soprano Olivia Vermeulen and the Ensemble Nuovo Aspetto present a fascinating preview of this talented composer.

CPO's latest CD featuring the Capella Orlandi brings together stage music by Gottfried Finger and John Eccles, who wrote songs for the famous English stage actress Anne Bracegirdle. At the end of the seventeenth century England's theatrical world was shaped by the defensive stance of traditionalists toward influences from the Italian opera and the magnificence radiating from the French court. The English counterproposal, the 'English opera', was a combination of 'heroic plays' with musical inserts ranging from individual songs, as were performed during Shakespeare's time, to 'all-sung masques', miniature operas with pastoral content. The Mad Lover is a good example of the English opera. On this recording song inserts from other masques are added to this comedy by John Fletcher from 1647. Anne Bracegirdle was so very successful with compositions by John Eccles that she later exclusively sang works by him.

Reinhard Keiser’s Kleine theatralische Musik contains arrangements of instrumental versions of opera numbers composed for Hamburg and performed there. With the greatest probability this work involves a collection of »theater music« compiled by the composer from his operas written prior to 1718. This work is complemented by further instrumental music as well as cantatas and arias by Keiser. The program covers a spectrum including Keiser’s initial years in Hamburg, the period of his greatest success in the second decade of the eighteenth century, and his difficult traveling years following 1719.