Rebirth (Autographed CD) – Sonya Yoncheva

Composers: Various
Artists: Sonya Yoncheva, Cappella Mediterranea, Leonardo García Alarcón
Conductor: Leonardo García Alarcón
Number of Discs: 1
Label: Sony Classical
CD Release Date: February 3, 2021

The lockdown of Spring 2020 allowed Sonya Yoncheva and conductor Leonardo García Alarcón to make the album they had been considering for ten years. Rebirth is a message of hope but also the exploration of an idea: that silence and inactivity are the best prelude to creative renewal.

Yoncheva’s fourth solo album for Sony Classical includes music spanning more than five centuries, from folksong to pop, via some of the most powerful moments in seventeenth-century opera. All the music, in Yoncheva’s view, is contemporary: “Certain styles of musical composition have remained surprisingly close to us through 500 years of history, combining enormous emotional thrust with great simplicity,” she says.

From the dawn of opera and music by Monteverdi, the album plots a thematic journey from the Italy of Cavalli, his pupil Strozzi and heir Stradella, to the England of Dowland, Gibbons and Ferrabosco – whose motet “Hear me, O God” employs the same four-note theme as ABBA’s “Like an Angel Passing Through My Room.” After dance-inspired works from Spain and Latin America, and Alarcón’s reconstruction of an aria by Antonio Draghi, Yoncheva offers a traditional folksong from her Bulgarian homeland.

Media were full of praise after Sonya Yoncheva performed her album repertoire at the Salzburg Festival in August 2020: “Music that moves you to tears,” wrote the APA, and the FAZ called it “an unforgettable emotional experience.”

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