Chantal Santon-Jeffery / Galilei Consort / Benjamin Chénier STRADELLA Lagrime e Sospiri

Alessandro Stradella’s music is currently enjoying a moment, and not before time. Ensemble Mare Nostrum’s Stradella Project is now four volumes into its comprehensive recording survey of the composer’s oratorios, leading the revival of fortunes that Stradella’s expressive and multifaceted music has long deserved. This recording from soprano Chantal Santon Jeffery and France’s Galilei Consort cherry-picks from both the composer’s sacred and secular works, as well as his instrumental music, to create a more accessible (and even more persuasive) case for this neglected master.

The problem, as the disc’s own notes acknowledge, is that for a long time Stradella (whose fragmented career began in Rome before relocating to Venice and finally Genoa) was better known for his colourful biography than his music. Sex scandals, attempted murders and actual murders may make for a great story but they also bring a certain energy to music comfortable at the emotional extremes.

Take the mad scene from the opera La forza dell’amore paterno, for example, which reels and wails in explosive and unexpected musical directions. Jeffery’s light soprano rides the waves of musical emotion with ease, marshalling the shifting moods with precision but also a wonderful expressive abandon. Another opera scene, this one from Moro per amore, shows us the ‘hell of love’ in grotesque musical detail that lurches between despair and fury with bewildering speed thanks to the ferocious brilliance of the Galilei Consort’s musicians, directed from the violin by Benjamin Chenier.

The oratorios are no less charged. From its exquisite Overture through both the colourful recitative and the arias, the lovely Santa Pelagia charts an appealing course between sensuality (the saint was a former courtesan) and chaste self-control, while San Giovanni Battista’s Salome is a young woman terrifyingly in control of her sexual allure and power, reaching its peak in dizzying semiquaver passages that twinkle like the gemstones in Salome’s dress as she dances.

Anyone looking for a quick introduction to Stradella’s music should find more than enough incentive here to search out more, while those already familiar will take pleasure in the dramatic scope of these fine performances. (Alexandra Coghlan / Gramophone)