New Album: Facce d’Amore
Facce d’amore is the second collaboration of Il pomo d’oro and Maxim Emelyanychev with rising star countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński. It features a selection of arias spanning 85 years of the Baroque period, and several world premiere recordings.
After the successful Anima Sacra album, the debut recording of Jakub Józef Orliński, and first collaboration with Il pomo d’oro on Warner Classics/Erato,
Facce d’amore, ‘Faces of love’ follows Jakub Józef Orliński’s first solo album, Anima Sacra, which moved Gramophone magazine to announce that “This is a voice with a big future.” It brings a switch from the sacred to the personal and passionate. As the Polish-born, New York-trained countertenor says, the programme – which includes eight world premiere recordings – comprises “operatic arias that tell a story, showing a musical picture of a male lover in the baroque era – not only the positive side, like joyful or reciprocated love, but also anger or even madness.” Spanning some 85 years of the baroque period, the arias on Facce d’amore are by Handel, Cavalli, Alessandro Scarlatti, Bononcini, Conti, Hasse, Orlandini, Predieri and Matteis.
REVIEWS
Gramophone (December 2019)
“It’s music by Luca Antonio Predieri (a nearcontemporary of Handel’s) that really hits the mark. Predieri’s gentle lyricism and clean lines suit Orliński’s soft-grained voice well. He’s no convincing bad boy…but this supple and sweet-toned instrument has plenty to bring elsewhere…Il Pomo d’Oro offer all their usual technicolour support and showmanship.”
Opera Magazine (February 2020)
“A wide-ranging and well-chosen collection devoted to the many faces of love… it reveals Orliński as an exceptional talent who is more than a poster boy with a ravishing voice… Orliński’s talents as a dramatic singer are at their most potent in the accompanied recitative and aria ‘Ah! stigie larve … Vaghe pupille’; here, aided by splendidly committed direction and playing, Orliński achieves spine-tingling intensity and passion.”
Presto Classical (20th December 2019)
“The voice has gained new colours and strength since last year’s Anima sacra; there are fireworks aplenty in arias from Scarlatti’s Pirro e Demetrio and Conti’s Don Chisciotte in Sierra Morena (in which he ornaments all the way down to a bottom C!), and Il pomo d’oro are fantastically unbridled in Nicola Matteis’s purely instrumental Ballo dei Bagatellieri. A baroque recital to treasure.” — Katherine Cooper
The Guardian (14th November 2019)
A recital full of dramatic immediacy.
Opera Now (January 2020)
Jakub Józef Orliński’s countertenor grows apace, and is sounding more robust and coloured in Facce d’amore, where he provides a selection of Italian arias themed around the concept of being in love.