ARIANNA

“Kate Lindsey excels in this emotional roller coaster… gives 100% committment to every word and note.” * * * * * The London Times

“Ardent, brilliant, stately…. Lindsey’s ravishing performances immerse us in her joys and suffering.” * * * * * BBC Music Magazine

“A heart-wrenching presentation in which every word is turned to extract maximum effect, every phrase is delicately, agonizingly woven.” Operawire

“Lindsey sings with delicious intimacy, as if she were whispering in our ears.” Gramophone

“Trembling with unbridled emotion.” * * * * * Rondo

“Kate Lindsey is a vocal miracle.” RBB Kultur

Kate follows up her critically acclaimed album Thousands of Miles with a second disc with Alpha Classics, Arianna. Here, she explores a wholly different musical landscape, the story of Ariadne in music written by composers of the 18th Century.

In partnership with Jonathan Cohen and his superlative ensemble 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.