"Eco d'amore" means "echo of love," and indeed there are echo effects galore in this collection of Alessandro Scarlatti arias by British soprano Elizabeth Watts. But that's not the half of it. The elder Scarlatti's output, which included some 100 operas, remains perhaps the least explored of that of any major composer, and even if all Watts had done was pick out some choice arias, she would have performed an important service. As it is, she selects arias that grant an equal role to the orchestra, and the venerable English Concert under Laurence Cummings is very much a star of this show. There are echo effects and many other distinctive ways of knitting vocal soloist and orchestra together. These are most apparent in the long sequence of slow numbers in the middle of the program. Scarlatti has thus far been mostly the province of big operatic sopranos going back in time slightly from the athletic arias of Handel and Vivaldi. Watts gets one of her high Cs out of the way quickly (and even outdoes that one later); she hits the notes, but isn't absolutely better than her better-known compatriots. In the slower arias, however, she shines. The imitative back-and-forth between Watts and the English Concert is just part of a performance in which soloist and orchestra are coordinated at a very rare level. Harmonia Mundi backs the performers sonically to the hilt, and there are many junctures at which this recording is positively haunting.
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