"TORMÉNTASE EL ALMA"

Music by Domenico Scarlatti, Juan Oliver y Astorga, Giacomo Facco and Domenico Porretti.

"Thirty years before Francesco Sabatini settled in Madrid in the service of the kings, Domenico Scarlatti headed a notable series of Italian artists and composers who took the initiative to travel from their native land to the peninsula, drawn by the cultural appeal of the Spanish court. Other Italian musicians in the palace circle – apart from better-known figures such as Scarlatti himself and Luigi Boccherini – included Domenico Porretti (principal cellist of the Royal Chamber during the reigns of Philip V, Ferdinand VI and Charles III) and Giacomo Facco (principal violinist and composer of the Capilla Real of Philip V). Moreover, the work Sabatini carried out for the royal family, much of it extending and remodelling existing buildings, was a practice that also flourished in the musical sphere in the eighteenth century. Imagining how the rhythmic emphasis of Scarlatti's sonatas sounds on other instruments, beyond the harpsichord or other keyboards, can be a temptation hard to resist, and the ensemble La Tempestad succumbs to it through the transcriptions of its director, the harpsichordist Silvia Márquez. In addition, this concert will rescue one of the least explored areas of Scarlatti's output – his cantatas – as well as practically unknown arias by Porretti and Facco. The programme will be completed by the composer Juan Oliver Astorga, from Murcia, a cosmopolitan musician as yet little studied, who worked at several European courts before returning to Spain to join the Real Cámara of Charles III as a violinist."