Nuria Rial / Dima Orsho / Musica Alta Ripa - Mother

Throughout the ages, motherhood has had a magnetic attraction on art and music. The Virgin Mary, the Roman empress Agrippina, the Babylonian queen Nitocris: these are only a few examples in which early music has addressed motherhood in operas, oratorios and cantatas. Yet the picture is not always loving and romantic: mothers can be brutal and vindictive, or suffering victims. Despite all the cultural differences between Occident and Orient, there is however often a common mother image. Exactly this thematic connection has been the inspiration for the collaboration of the Catalan soprano Nuria Rial, the Syrian singer and composer Dima Orsho, the flutist and producer Danya Segal and the multiple prizewinning baroque ensemble Musica Alta Ripa. In "Mother", Orient and Occident cross paths beneath the subject of motherhood, baroque arias mingle with oriental songs. The chosen arias for the recording mainly come from operas and oratorios by Georg Friedrich Händel (1685-1759). In "Il Pianto di Maria" one meets Virgin Mary mourning her lost son. In "Belshazzar" which takes place in Babylon, Queen Nitocris loses her natural son, King Belshazzar, in the war against the Persians. In "Solomon", a mother tries to recover her son. On the other hand, in Georg Philipp Telemann's (1681-1767) aria "Komm o Schlaf" from "Germanicus", Agrippina, the mother of Caligula, tries to dispel her sorrows in the quiet solitude of night. While Nuria Rial is the leading voice of the Occident, the oriental songs are sung and partially also composed by Dima Orsho: "Wa Habibi" is an anonymous Syrian-Christian song for Good Friday, where one hears again the Virgin Mary mourning her lost son. In "Hidwa", composed by Orsho, a mother rocks her child to sleep and laments her own lost life. The recording also includes some instrumental works such as Händels "Lamentations of the Israelites for the death of Joseph" and "Tamburino", deliberately chosen to link the content and emotions of the different images of motherhood. The recording ends with a highly interesting piece, which Dima Orsho has composed specifically for this project: In "Ishtar: The Greater Mother", one encounters the mother of the Arab world, a Babylonian and Hittite goddess, called "goddess of all goddesses". It is precisely in this piece that historical European instruments combined with Arabic instruments create a special sound dialogue between Orient and Occident.