Not only languishing lovers, jilted wives and virtuous shepherdesses throng the Baroque opera stage. Scarcely any other epoch in music history  boasts such fiery and passionate female figures as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – women who face their perilous destinies now heroically, now meekly, but always long-suffering and self-assertive. Mezzo soprano Lucile Richardot and harpsichordist Jean-Luc Ho present three outstanding figures from European cultural history: the untameable Media, who in furious passion takes revenge on her opponents, the powerful sorceress Armida, who ensnares her lover and keeps him prisoner, and Circe, the Greek goddess of magic itself – three women who rule their worlds, but are themselves ruled by their unrestrained passions.

Composers such as George Frideric Handel, Francesco Cavalli, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, Jean-Baptiste Lully, François Couperin and François Collin de Blamont succumbed to the spell of these heroines and composed some of their most beautiful and haunting melodies for their throats – showpieces for the powerful and androgynous mezzo voice of Lucile Richardot.