In her programme Mirrors, the exceptional and vivacious singer from Trinidad and Tobago Jeanine De Bique presents arias sung by strong, courageous and passionately loving women. Famous Handel arias, for example from Rodelinda, are mirrored in lesser-known arias by other composers who have interpreted the same figure or emotional situation. Multifaceted reflections beam out from the same character, as if visualised through a cracked mirror. The arias tell of crucial moments in the psychological development of the operatic heroines and cast light on the emotional diversity of female experience.

“It seems as if everything that has shaped me up until now as a person and musician has given me the means to do justice to the musical and emotional demands of the programme,” says De Bique, whose full, beautifully ringing voice is capable of astonishing emotional power. Hence Mirrors is also a very personal programme, which aims to link Handel’s mature arias with those of lesser-known composers such as Carl Heinrich Graun and Riccardo Broschi, who – and this is frequently not known – were in part the original creators of the characters singing the arias. Together with the Baroque orchestra Concerto Köln, De Bique leads us to fascinating and sonorous spaces of the soul, in which human emotion and musical beauty act as mirrors to each other.