Orfeo son io - Musikfest Bremen

L'Arpeggiata Instrumental Ensemble
Rolando Villazón Tenor
Céline Scheen soprano
Christina Pluhar Program, concept, arrangements, theorbo and musical direction

Program:
Arias and instrumental works by Claudio Monteverdi, Luigi Rossi, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Carlos Gardel, Luiz Bonfá and others.

At the 2016 Bremen Music Festival, Rolando Villazón made his role debut as Orfeo in Monteverdi's opera of the same name. The Orpheus myth has stayed with him ever since and this first collaboration with Christina Pluhar and L'Arpeggiata gave rise to the idea for a new project about the ancient hero: "Orfeo son io". The program premiered at the 2021 Musikfest - still under Corona conditions! - and has been conceptually expanded again and again over the years through countless other performances. As the archetype for the strength and power of music, the most famous figure in music history has inspired many other composers and so the program - like the corresponding recording released in autumn 2025 - currently spans an arc from Monteverdi and his contemporaries to Christoph Willibald Gluck and into the 20th century with Carlos Gardel and Luiz Bonfá. Reason enough to invite the Villazón-Pluhar dream team back with this lively, colorful and nuanced Gesamtkunstwerk. It jumps playfully between times and moods with emotional explosiveness and, as a mirror of our deepest human truths, never loses sight of the core of the theme: the eternal longing for love!