Vagaries of Love

Baroque music from Dominique
Labelle and Musica Pacifica -
stimulates
GERALD FENECH

'A beautiful issue that is as heartwarming as it is stimulating.'

René de Boisdeffre: Works for Violin and Piano 1. © 2016 Jan A Jarnicki and Acte Préalable

As one may surmise from the title, Mi Palpita il Cor, all the pieces on this programme deal with the theme of love in all its various aspects — a subject very close to the heart for Baroque composers. The 'vagaries of love' offered wonderful opportunities for composers to display the highly expressive gestural language they developed in parallel with contemporary poets and painters to express powerful feelings. Indeed, rhythms, harmonic structures and inventive melodic figures projected moods and their manifestations, such as sighs, laughter and angry outbursts, in great detail, and although no words were sung in sonatas and concertos, this expressive approach was so widespread and so thoroughly comprehended that performers and listeners could find affinity with both genres, and hence similar emotional reactions would be drawn.