Record Review
14th March 2020
Record of the Week

BBC Music Magazine
April 2020
Choral & Song Choice

Gramophone Awards
2020
Finalist - Recital

Kate Lindsey (mezzo)

Arcangelo, Jonathan Cohen

Scarlatti, A: L’Arianna - Cantata for soprano, strings & B.c.
Händel: Ah! Crudel, nel pianto mio, HWV 78
Haydn: Arianna a Naxos, cantata, Hob.XXVIb / 2

After a first album dedicated to Weill, Zemlinsky and Korngold (Alpha272), Kate Lindsey explores here her other repertoire of choice, the music of the eighteenth century. In partnership with Jonathan Cohen and Arcangelo, she has recorded three cantatas focusing on the myth of Ariadne, abandoned on the island of Naxos after helping Theseus kill the Cretan Minotaur by giving him a ball of thread so that he could find his way back through the labyrinth. Alessandro Scarlatti's Ebra d amor fuggia (1707) relates Ariadne's flight, drunk with love , alongside Theseus, for whom she expresses her tenderness in the magnificent aria Pur ti stringo . The same year, the young Handel composed his cantata Ah crudel, nel pianto mio, this time with an anonymous abandoned lover as the subject. In 1789, Joseph Haydn also turned to Ariadne, in a cantata for which several orchestrations exist. The one recorded here is by Sigismund Neukomm, Haydn's pupil between 1797 and 1804. Three faces of disappointed love, brought to passionate life by the mezzo-soprano.

"Her strong and assured voice slips easily into this music…and throughout she shows impressive technical control and agility. More strikingly, though, she brings her stage experience to bear in dramatic readings whose intelligent responses to the differing nuances of these three pieces are what really make the project spark...The playing of Arcangelo under Jonathan Cohen is typically high-quality, and often heartbreakingly attendant to the drama." - Gramophone Magazine, February 2020.