Pianist, name not listed
Phillippe Jaroussky, male soprano
Jérôme Ducros, piano
The past few decades have certainly seen a huge development in the recovery of the art of adult men singing in the alto and mezzo soprano range. Phillippe Jaroussky has brought that far, far farther than old Alfred Deller ever did. It's interesting to hear him in 19th century, romantic style music instead of the baroque arias and operas he usually sings. I would guess he's a lot closer to how the legendary baroque castrati sounded than even the available recordings of the last of those surgically created male sopranos singing in a rather horrid, over the top way well into his old age.
But I was going to concentrate on Pauline Viardot instead of male sopranos. A number of Viardot's songs are a reminder that she was Spanish and was able to give first hand advice to other composers about "Spanish music" of the type that would be more often composed well after she wrote this song, probably in the late 1870s.
She wrote a lot more music than what I read led to believe last week.
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