Pianto napoletano • Collegium 1704

Southern Italian music can express the whole range of human emotions with extreme sug­gestiveness, from pure joy to deepest sorrow. One generation separates the lives of two great figures of eighteenth-century Neapolitan music, Alessandro Scarlatti and Francesco Durante, and their works are permeated with both sadness and hope. Scarlatti entered the history of music primarily as an opera composer, while the focus of Durante‘s legacy lies in the realm of sacred music. His extensive two-choir Requiem is one of the most impressive settings of the funeral mass of the 18th century.