This recording presents the highly praised composer Niccolo Jommelli, who was already known by his great operas and oratorios, in a more intimate light. He...

This recording presents the highly praised composer Niccolo Jommelli, who was already known by his great operas and oratorios, in a more intimate light. He was heavily talented to express dramatic effects and passionate feelings. On that reason he was very often called “the Italian Gluck.” For a lot of his contemporary colleagues he had been regarded as the innovator of special sound effects for the orchestra, which he defined as musical colors which on a later stage had been ascribed to Stamitz. There was a saying that some from the audience jumped from their seats during the crescendo and only realized during the diminuendo that they had stopped breathing when Jommelli presented these affects in Rome the first time. Soprano Barbara Kusa comes from Argentina. She studied at Pontificia Universidad Catolica Argentina and then in Buenos Aires. After coming to Europe in 2004 she studied early music at l’Ecole Nationale de Musique de Pantin in France. She is an internationally sought-after soloist for Baroque opera and oratorio, and she works with a large number of early music ensembles across Europe and overseas.