Schwetzingen SWR Festival: Love – a Strange Game

Songs about love, presented by singer Lea Desandre and the Ensemble Jupiter with Thomas Dunford. Love is: attention, the closest connection, erotic desire. It is the greatest of all feelings. It is logical, therefore, that the most emotional of all arts, music, has chosen love as its very own field of activity. Countless musical works tell of longing, desire, ecstasy, tenderness, loss, and jealousy, and thus mezzo-soprano Lea Desandre and lutenist Thomas Dunford, who are also a love-experienced married couple, could have filled several festival seasons with amorous music alone. This evening, which the Ensemble Jupiter adds color to, is a concentrate. It moves, inspired by the Baroque era's preference for extremes and contrasts, from Monteverdi's solo madrigal of a desperate lover and his lament for Ariadne abandoned by Theseus to Frescobaldi's song of a rejected lover, who is given little support – except for the bass line of the passacaglia. A reconciliatory ending is provided by Tarquinio Merula with a hymn to fidelity: "Crazy," he says, "is he who believes that I would turn my steps from my beautiful beloved for sweet love flattery or for proud threats."