A confession: I know very little of the music of Alessandro Scarlatti, but I did not want this significant anniversary to get passed over, for it is 300 years to the day since his death in Napoli.
Alessandro was renowned primarily as a vocal composer, but also made a number of innovations in instrumental music – picked up by his son Domenico, a prolific composer in this area.
Opera and church music were Alessandro’s main forms of musical currency, but we begin with an invaluable guide to his music from Brilliant Classics, presenting a sequence of concertos, sinfonias and sonatas:
Following this is one of Alessandro’s principal compositions for the church, his Dixit Dominus in a fine performance with Trevor Pinnock conducting the English Concert and a starry team of soloists:
Finally, here is a link to what some regard as Alessandro’s best opera – the three-act drama Telemarco:
Published post no.2,695 – Thursday 22 October 2025
Jamie Lidell and Luke Schneider have created a kind of sonic tool to navigate a liminal state of mind. Their new collaborative LP, A Companion For The Spaces Between Dreams, is due for release on 31 October on Brooklyn experimental imprint Northern Spy Records, designed as a reverent companion for psychedelic journeys born from Lidell’s own ketamine therapy sessions, which deepened his belief in art’s healing power.
“A mind is often found more exposed during psychedelic experiences,” Lidell explains. “Specifically in a therapeutic setting, where trust is key to approach issues and work through events in the way of growth. This is music to support and guide the listening with or without psychedelic sensory heightening.”
From the album, and released today, New Landtravels the distance, shape shifting with sparkling, pulsating textures and vast drones that stretch for miles. Brent Stewart’s accompanying film for New Land combines three simple ingredients- expired Super 8mm tri X black & white film, sunlight and pure water from a hidden Tennessee creek.”
Neither Lidell nor Schneider is a stranger to brain-bending timbres. UK-born Lidell cut his teeth as a member of the microhouse duo Super_Collider and later released genre bending solo albums on Warp Records, spanning abstract techno to neo-soul. His prior 2025 album, Places of Unknowing, was Lidell’s first in nine years, exploring symphonic arrangements indebted to David Bowie and David Sylvian. As a pedal steel guitarist, Schneider has worked with artists including Margo Price, William Tyler, and Orville Peck. He has issued cosmic solo LPs on Third Man Records and Leaving Records, which meld instrumental shoegaze, outlaw country, and new age.
Their partnership emerged unexpectedly while working on a promotional video for Moog. Two days of freewheeling collaboration in the studio sparked A Companion For The Spaces Between Dreams, a collection of five long-form pieces that are almost suite-like. Lidell uses modular synths, Fender Rhodes, tape effects, and percussion to weave a fathomless tapestry from Schneider’s improvised pedal steel swells.
Lidell later returned to the sessions in a window of heightened neuroplasticity, refining the material through layers of sonic micro‑detail. The result is tactile and transportive. Prickly textures and sinewy drones call to mind dewy flowers at dawn. Whispers of krautrock flicker, echoing Lidell’s preference for jagged sonics during treatments. A Companion For The Spaces Between Dreams evades the pitfalls of clinical sterility, inducing a vulnerable inner voyage.
If the Wexford Festival is known and acclaimed for its commitment to reviving obscurer corners of the operatic repertoire, how could it also manage to open its 2025 season with one of Giuseppe Verdi’s best-known works? The instant success of Il Trovatore after its première in Rome in 1853 encouraged the financially astute composer to revise it for the lucrative Paris market, which preferred operas in French, before pirate versions of the score could deprive him of rights and royalties.
Verdi transformed Il Trovatore into Le Trouvère, revising the score to take account of the French text, adding a ballet to conform to the format of the Paris Opera (and justify his fee), tweaking the final scene, and overseeing the first performance in February 1857. Le Trouvère enjoyed a long reign in France and its colonies, before falling from favour by the 1930s. Musicological research led by David Lawton has encouraged revivals and the production of a critical edition of Le Trouvère. If Wexford could have its cake and eat it with this very familiar rarity, there’s an eeriness in hearing unanticipated words to very familiar melodies – who would have guessed “di quella pira” rendered down to “bûcher infame” – which remains slightly disconcerting.
Director Ben Barnes brought forward Verdi’s plot, originally set in medieval Spain and encompassing love triangles, civil war, burnings at the stake, and a gipsy’s curse, to the Spanish Civil War. The rebellious troubadour Manrique is now a dashing bicycle-mounted leader of an Anarcho-Syndicalist detachment; the Comte de Luna, his rival for Leonore, is a smartly uniformed Nationalist, albeit one who seems very happy to break into convents (shouldn’t it have been the other way round?). Liam Doona’s single set, with lofty shuttered openings upstage, flexibly suggested bivouacs, cafes and prison cells, as well as the bedroom where Leonore and Manrique finally manage to spend some time before fate and duty tear them apart.
The major difference between Il Trovatore and Le Trouvère is the ballet sequence at the start of Act III. Although rarely performed, the music showcases Verdi’s talent for orchestral writing, and the Wexford Festival Opera Orchestra sparkled under conductor Marcus Bosch. In 1857 the ballet illustrated the colourful life of a gypsy encampment, but it presents a problem for contemporary directors lacking the huge corps de ballet and budget of the Paris Opera. Ben Barnes used newsreel footage of the Spanish Civil War, and three rifle-toting dancers, to turn the ballet into the Comte de Luna’s uneasy dreams, but it remained one of the slacker parts of a production that usually kept the action belting along; in the last act the imprisoned Manrique and the gypsy Azucena (his mother – or is she?) even rose rather squeakily through the floor to avoid a scene change and keep the melodies unfurling.
The Wexford Festival Opera Chorus convinced as revolutionaries, soldiers, monks, and (especially) nuns, but the grand scenes only serve to outline the relationships between the four leads. Kseniia Nikolaieva sang Azucena powerfully but with few consonants, while Giorgi Lomiselli grew into the Comte de Luna and put some depth into one of Verdi’s less engaging baddies. Lydia Grindatto as Leonore showed no signs of the illness that was announced at curtain up, and Eduardo Niave, whose French accent was the best in the cast, was a young and charismatic Manrique. A solid – and sold out – start to the 2025 Festival.
You can watch this production of Le Trouvère below:
Stand by for a review of this production, due tomorrow on Arcana (internet permitting, as I’ve just moved house!) – but thanks to Wexford / RTÉ you can enjoy the production online:
Two days ago we noted the first performance of Aaron Copland’s ballet Rodeo in 1942. Now we look at the first performance of his Symphony no.3, which took place on this day in 1946. The Third is Copland’s flagship symphony, an impressive and powerful work that reaches its apex with music that you will no doubt recognise as the Fanfare for the Common Man, written in 1942. Here is a fine performance of the whole work from the New York Philharmonic and Leonard Bernstein, recorded for DG in 1986:
As with Rodeo, Emerson, Lake & Palmer were not far away, and their adaptation of the Fanfare for the Common Man became their biggest hit in 1977:
Published post no.2,691 – Saturday 18 October 2025
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