Mariana Flores

The Argentinian soprano Mariana Flores has sung her way into the hearts of Baroque fans on every continent with her fiery and emotional interpretations. In recent years alongside Leonardo García-Alarcón and the Cappella Mediterranea, she has realised many exceptional projects, for which she was awarded prizes such as the Diapason d’or and the Choc de Classica

Entitled Teatro dei Sensi – Theatre of the Senses – she transports us into Venice of the seventeenth century and the music theatre cosmos of Francesco Cavalli, a composer who shaped the history of opera like hardly any other. In the pleasure-drunk Serenissima there was no centralist princely court and thus no court theatre which would have been controlled by an absolutist ruler. This encouraged the establishment of an opera culture that was not designed to please an individual person but had to woo the favour of the broad-based public. As early as 1637, the first public opera house in the world was founded with the Teatro San Cassiano, where Cavalli also brought out his first opera Le nozze di Teti e di Peleo in 1639. By the time he had written his last surviving opera Pompeo Magno (1666), he had produced around thirty works for the theatre; here, Cavalli experimented with multifaceted conceptual and musical possibilities of expression, making the emotional depth of his characters a credible and empathetic experience.

The programme Teatro dei Sensi resounds with the wide range of Cavalli’s poignant and highly emotional powers of invention, from which his successors were to reap a rich musical and dramatic harvest even into the twentieth century.