Schwetzingen SWR Festival: Love—a strange game

Songs about love, presented by singer Lea Desandre and the ensemble Jupiter with Thomas Dunford. Love is: affection, intimate connection, erotic desire. It is the greatest of all emotions. So it is only logical that music, the most emotional of all arts, has chosen love as its very own field of activity. Countless musical works tell of longing, desire, ecstasy, tenderness, loss, and jealousy, and so mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre and lutenist Thomas Dunford, who are also a married couple experienced in love, could have filled several festival seasons with amorous music alone. This evening, to which the *Ensemble Jupiter* adds color, is a concentrate. Inspired by the Baroque era's penchant for extremes and contrasts, it ranges from Monteverdi's solo madrigal about a desperate lover and his lament for Ariadne, abandoned by Theseus, to Frescobaldi's song of a spurned lover who has little left to hold on to – except the bass line of the passacaglia. Tarquinio Merula provides a conciliatory ending with a song of praise for fidelity: "Crazy," he says, "is he who believes that I would turn away from my beautiful beloved for sweet flattery or proud threats."