News

The 2017 BBC Music Magazine Awards nominations have been announced, and you can vote now for your favourite albums of the past year.

Among this year's candidates in the Opera category is Christina Pluhar and l'Arpeggiata's exquisite Cavalli album l'Amore Innamorato (which translates to 'love in love').

“Hana Blažiková's limpid sound contrasts well with Nuria Rial's smokier tones," wrote BBC Music Magazine's critic in the 5-star review, in praise of the two superb sopranos on the album. "After L'Arpeggiata's recent forays into jazz, popular and cross-over repertoires, it is good to hear them return to Baroque music - and on dazzling form.”

The BBC Music Magazine Awards are the only classical music prizes open entirely to the public. Make your voice heard and vote in any of the eight categories. Entries close 24 February, 2017.

Christina Pluhar and her ensemble L’Arpeggiata have made a speciality of fusing cultures and musical styles – as they have shown in a string of Erato albums, such as Mediterraneo, Via Crucis and Los Pajaros Perdidos. Now, with Orfeo Chamán (released in October 2016) they have moved into the world of opera by taking one of the most famous Ancient Greek myths, infusing it with spirituality drawn from Asia and the Native Americans, and giving it musical expression by blending Baroque and traditional styles and a contemporary idiom influenced by Latin American popular music.

With this Erato release, admirers of L’Arpeggiata can enjoy substantial highlights of Orfeo Chamán in audio form and also a DVD of the entire opera, recorded for video at the Teatro Mayor Julio Mario Santo Domingo in Bogotá, Colombia in November 2014, when it received its world premiere staging.

As Christina Pluhar has written: “The musical elements – like our story, with its combination of mythological elements from different periods and continents – navigate between musical cultures and centuries and combine to create something new and universal. I composed some pieces myself, while in others I reworked and arranged melodic or harmonic material from the Baroque period or from the traditional music of different cultures, and adapted it to fit the libretto.”

The libretto is by the Colombian poet Hugo Chaparro Valderrama. The story of Orpheus – the divinely gifted musician who visits Hades in a bold attempt to retrieve his dead beloved, Eurydice – has, of course, been treated by such composers as Monteverdi, Gluck, Offenbach and Harrison Birtwistle.

Pluhar explains that, “in Orfeo Chamán, we have woven Greek and pre-Columbian mythology together and incorporated shamanic rituals into the story of Orpheus.” Shamanism (still found in Eastern Europe, Asia, the Americas, Australia, sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania) is based on the belief that – like humans – animals, plants, rocks and water possess a soul. A shaman acquires the capacity to travel between different worlds and communicate with spirits, and in Orfeo Chamán, Orpheus takes a shamanic journey to another world to recover a lost soul. He is accompanied by his nahual, or guardian spirit – here in the form of a jaguar, the Latin American spotted panther. This Orpheus is a poet, magician and religious teacher, and, like the Orpheus of Greek myth, he can entrance the birds and beasts with his music.

The Teatro Mayor Julio Mario Santo Domingo invited the Colombian-Swiss stage directors Rolf and Heidi Abderhalden to produce an opera at the theatre and the Abderhaldens invited Christina Pluhar to work on the project – originally conceived as a production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, but soon becoming the creation of a new work. For the leading role, Pluhar chose a performer from the world of popular music, the young Argentinian singer and guitarist Nahuel Pennisi. Something of a real-life Orfeo, he has been blind since birth and has used music as a way of exploring and interacting with his environment.

Pennisi plays his guitar not against his torso but across his lap, almost like a zither. As Pluhar says, “With his emotional voice and his unique guitar technique, Nahuel opens our ears to a new world – without the need for stage effects. He sings the music as if he just composed it himself, and the text as if it came straight from his heart.”

The other singers are classically trained vocalists, experts in the Baroque style, who are also comfortable with singing popular music: “Our cast’s vocal and technical flexibility enabled me to incorporate a variety of musical styles in the work that were suited to the voice of the singer concerned, to the character of the role, to the expression of the text or to the atmosphere of the situation,” says Pluhar. They are joined by a company of actors and dancers for a musically and scenically colourful spectacle – haunting, exhilarating and moving.

Orfeo Chamán is available in a special CD/DVD edition in October.

For the Paris-based Baroque Ensemble l'Arpeggiata, this weekend was to be a joyous celebration of 15 years of music-making across styles, eras and cultures. They had organised a l'Arpeggiata Festival at the Salle Gaveau for the occasion, with several concerts, surprise guests, and a late-night jam session on the programme.

Following the attacks in Paris and the violence that struck in particular the concert venue Le Bataclan on Friday 13 November, l'Arpeggiata founder and director Christina Pluhar announced that the group wished to go ahead with these concerts on Saturday and Sunday, to pay tribute to the victims, sharing music, art, culture, beauty and community; to soothe and fortify those in attendance.

"We are living through a dark period in our history. What has happened in Paris is shocking. All our thoughts go out to the victims and their families," l'Arpeggiata wrote in a statement.

"We, the musicians of l'Arpeggiata, have taken the weighty decision to continue with the concerts at the Salle Gaveau. Faced with the barbaric atrocities perpetrated, we mobilise for peace.

"Music is our weapon to combat the terror which overwhelms us."

Hours before the scheduled concerts, however, the Préfecture de Police ordered the closure of the Salle Gaveau and all other concert venues, and the events could not take place despite the best wishes of the musicians. Other events will be announced at a later date.

We leave you with some of the music that would have been heard at the concert: Piante ombrose, in the hope that it does indeed offer some comfort. "Does the god of thunder so mercilessly scorch the earth?"

In 2000, with the beginning of a new millennium, the theorbist, harpist and conductor Christina Pluhar founded her ensemble l’Arpeggiata. The group quickly took flight and has gone from strength to strength over the past 15 years, having given more than 800 concerts in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia, and with more than a dozen acclaimed albums to its name.

With richly imaginative programmes brought to life by exceptional musicians and singers (including guests Philippe Jaroussky, Véronique Gens, Gianluigi Trovesi, Pepe Habichuela), l’Arpeggiata have built up a loyal following of music-lovers. Following their first successes, Christina Pluhar continued to explore an adventurous, genre-defying musical path combining music from different cultures and eras – the approach that still shapes l’Arpeggiata’s signature sound today.

This is an ensemble that never stops reinventing itself and the music it plays, with musicians that push boundaries and collaborations that are always surprising and invigorating.

L'Arpeggiata marks its 15th anniversary with a special event in Paris: the Arpeggiata Festival. Held at the elegant Salle Gaveau over two evenings, the festivities include a concert around the stunning new album of music by Cavalli, l'Amore innamorato, a 'surprise' programme, and a late-night jam: all journeying through 15 incredible years of musical adventure, with the long-serving ensemble musicians and returning guest soloists that have come to define the group's inimitable style.

On the programme: frenzied tarantellas, improvisations, fabulous voices, devilish dances, and a generous helping of humour and surprises!

The Festival l'Arpeggiata takes place on 14-15 November at the Salle Gaveau, Paris.

The limited edition CD/DVD of the new album, Cavalli: l'Amore Innamorato, is out 23 October. The bonus DVD includes 15 years of l'Arpeggiata performance highlights.

In her most ambitious and surprising project to date, Christina Pluhar and her genre-defying band show that switching from Baroque to jazz to bluegrass within a single piece of music is as easy as setting an iPod to shuffle.

On their new album Music for a while, L’Arpeggiata traces the natural progression that connects the 17^th-century arias of English composer Henry Purcell to the beating heart of most forms of popular music today. With hauntingly beautiful voices building in intensity over repeated ground bass, it’s no wonder arias like Dido’s Lament (When I Am Laid In Earth) have stuck around, as deeply moving today as when Purcell first penned them in the 1600s.

“We wished to underline the extraordinary modernity of Purcell’s music by constantly moving between the centuries in the harmonies and styles of the improvisations,” Pluhar explains. “The bass lines and melodies composed by Purcell remain intact, but the improvisatory style of the instruments suddenly switches centuries.”

Pluhar invited countertenor Philippe Jaroussky to let his inner jazzman shine in eternal favourites like O Solitude and the title track Music for a while. The Baroque musicians of L’Arpeggiata welcomed into the fold jazz guitarist Wolfgang Muthspiel and returning reedman Gianluigi Trovesi to do what L’Arpeggiata does best: create meeting points in sound that are universal and timeless, as daring as they are inevitable.

The music flows from the glorious ‘Alleluias’ of Purcell’s Evening Hymn to a bonus-track cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah… As only L’Arpeggiata could play it.

Music for a while is out now.

 

Just as in the album, the event will gather the great singers Mísia, Nuria Rial, Vincenzo Capezzuto, Raquel Andueza and Katerina Papadopoulou.

Christina Pluhar and l’Arpeggiata will certainly also hold a couple of surprises for the occasion…

 Click here to get the tour dates of l'Arpeggiata and Christina Pluhar.

 

After the so successful album Los Pajaros Perdidos, an expedition at the heart of latin american folklore, Christina Pluhar releases her fifth album with l’Arpeggiata. Mediterraneo combines many different styles as fado, fadango, tarantella ; it is an immersion into the authentic pattern of our latin origins.

The journey goes through Portugal, Catalonia, Italy and Greece. Each singer represents his culture : the Fado queen Misia sings the Portuguese program, the diva Nuria Rial stands for Catalonia, Andueza Raquez embodies Spain, and Vincenzo and Katerina Papadopoulou represent Italy and Greece.

This unique recording is an invitation to a cruise along the Mediterranean coasts. It is a captivating dialogue between traditional plucked instruments and the Baroque strings of l’Arpeggiata.