Musica Rivelata - Dominiek Riepe

Pietro Alessandro Gaspare Scarlatti (1660-1725) was the most outstanding composer of the late Italian Baroque. His work marks the end of the era of Monteverdi, Cavalli, Cesti, Carissimi, and Stradella. Although he acquired fame as an opera composer, he wrote more than six hundred cantatas, mostly for solo voice and continuo, and was the last to make a substantial contribution to the development of the genre, following an impressive evolution of more than a hundred years. Already in his own time, Scarlatti' recitals were considered bizarre, because of the unrestrained and profuse use of chromatic effects, to such an extent that even his contemporaries tired of them - take J.D. Heinchen's critical words about Scarlatti's "extravagant and irregular harmonies ... such as they emerge from the overflowing production of his cantatas" (1728). In the period of the triumph of the Neapolitan style in Europe, the composer was considered anything but an innovator or pioneer, but rather as an oddball. Totally in line with his distant predecessors Cavalieri and Carissimi, he published his 'Lamentazioni per la Settimana Santa for two high voices, two violins and basso continuo' in Florence in 1708. The alienating harmonic play emphasizes the unique atmosphere in the rendering of the lamentations of the Prophet Jeremiah, when, at the performance in the vespers of Holy Week, the candles in the church are extinguished one by one.