Schwetzinger SWR Festival: Timelessly Heartbreaking

Ancient music and a timeless theme: Resident artist Dorothee Oberlinger and countertenor Andreas Scholl musically explore love. Ah, love! How can I remain free when I bind myself to another person? Where does the self go when it risks merging with another into a we? "My heart is pounding, and I do not understand why," sings a person tormented by passion, jealousy, and pain in Handel's cantata Mi palpita il cor, whose heart "can no longer bear its chains in such great agony." We are already deep into the topic. Georg Friedrich Handel and the Venetian Antonio Caldara lead us with baroque solo cantatas into the highly emotional and often dramatic conflict of romantic closeness, a conflict between self-assertion and surrender, intimacy and distance, restraint and overwhelming passion. Andreas Scholl, the grand seigneur of countertenors, enters into a highly expressive dialogue with the flutes, which resident artist Dorothee Oberlinger also lets sing. Additionally, instrumental works by Bach and Arcangelo Corelli are included. A highly relevant contribution of early music to a timelessly heart-wrenching theme, concluding with an early wedding cantata by Telemann that offers a very personal conclusion: "Freedom should be the solution."