Anne McAlister of McAlister Matheson Music Ltd shares her thoughts about a Baroque group of musicians called L’Arpeggiata. Founded in 2000 by Christina Pluhar, the group have recorded eleven albums together and their latest release is a box-set collection of some of these discs.
They [L’Arpeggiata] do really quite funky early music things. Their most recent discs have been straightforward, well more straightforward, by composers like Monteverdi but their early discs were mainly on music from Baroque Italy. It involved arias, instrumental music, operas and they made about four or five recordings which have actually all come out in a box set.
They are quite amazing. The standard of the playing is incredibly high but they cross that line between ethnic music and classical music, so its not what you’d call high flown art music that’s really difficult to understand. Even if you don’t know much about early music you still enjoy it. There is a particular disc called All’Improvviso, which is improvisations on ground basses, (where you’ve got the same melody in the bass all the time) and they do things on top of that. That is one of the best Baroque discs ever, to be perfectly honest.
Their Monteverdi recordings are great, there’s a super recording of the Monteverdi Vespers, which is kind of more straightforwardly classical but they’ve also done a Monteverdi at the theatre disc, which again they’ve kind of improvised a bit round about Monteverdi’s music and it’s really catchy. Their most recent disc has been Mediterraneo where they’ve actually gone round the Mediterranean and it kind of sounds like music you’d hear if your were sitting at a Portuguese or Greek café on the seashore. Quite different from what they’ve done before. A group to watch out for, interesting and should have wide appeal.
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