Mezzo soprano Romina Basso and the Greek ensemble, Latinitas Nostraperform on a 2104 Naïve release called Lamento.
Lament
The lament was a popular form in the 17th century used by composers to express grief, and the intense volley of overlapping and intertwining emotions that grief provokes. Both text and music are highly charged in laments, creating an intensely dramatic exercise of catharsis wandering through shock and depression, desperation, anger, loneliness, longing, regret, revenge, sorrow, irrational thinking…even madness. Some laments are made-up tragedies usually on the subject of the love lives of Nymphs and Shepherds, others center on a specific tragic event.
In Luigi Rossi’s Lamento della regina di svezia, the Queen of Sweden mourns the death of her husband Gustavus Adolphus II, a monarch killed in battle in 1632. The Queen turns suicidal, crying throughout….'O, let someone slay me,' At the close of the lament, the exhausted queen falls silent, only to wander “in a frenzy like a madwoman.”
Romina Basso
The take no prisoners performances on this disc is intense. The listening isn’t easy—it’s not, for example, music that you can just have playing in the background. The performance commands attention, with the soloist Romina Basso, and all members of the continuo team and supporting instrumentalists alike, taking responsibility for leading the drama.
Latinitas Nostra
In their program booklet, we find a vision statement of sorts for the disc. The director, Markellos Chryssicos writes,
“We recorded in a moment of unbearable tension, striving to push to the limits every source of agitation, every effect, every ‘mannerisim’ we thought likely to saturate, at least temporarily, the two stereo microphones.”
To offend good taste seemed never their concern but rather a drive to exploit every limitation.