Another stunner from soprano Anna Prohaska. Following her wonderful disc of war-related music, she now turns her attention to two tragic heroines, Dido and Cleopatra. Both have inspired great music across the centuries, but Prohaska resists the attention to go as far as Berlioz, and frames this baroque collection with the start and finish of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. There are well-known Cleopatra arias – a devastating, piercing Se pietà di me non senti from Handel’s Giulio Cesare – and very little-known ones by Castrovillari, Sartorio, Cavalli and Graupner (a bizarre bilingual scene). It’s all beautifully planned and paced, with riveting instrumental interludes from Il Giardino Armonico, including Matthew Locke’s astonishingly modern Curtain Tune.
