L'Arpeggiata

L'Arpeggiata has built a twenty-year legacy through inventive renderings of early Baroque repertoire that highlight the very asymmetry once implied by the term itself. The ensemble has also pursued live and recorded projects that trace shared traits between Baroque music and both jazz and regional folk styles. Releases have appeared on prominent imprints such as Alpha, Naïve, and Erato, the last of which issued the 2024 collection Wonder Women.

Christina Pluhar, a theorbo player who has lived for extended periods in Paris yet continues to teach at the University of Graz where she once studied, formed the group in 2000. Its name was taken from a toccata by Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger. By the 2010s the musicians had performed at leading halls including Wigmore Hall in London, Carnegie Hall in New York, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, and the Sydney City Recital Hall. Festival engagements have included the Ludwigsburger Schlossfestspiele, the Pontoise Baroque Festival, and the Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci, at which Giovanni Andrea Bontempi’s 1662 opera Il Paride was presented. Collaborations have involved Baroque specialists such as Philippe Jaroussky alongside artists working in jazz and flamenco.

Early in its existence the ensemble recorded chiefly for France’s Alpha label, known for its opulent editions that drew connections between music and visual art of a given era. Its first Alpha release, a 2002 set of cantatas by Stefano Landi, was followed in 2004 by a full album devoted to Kapsperger. Several further projects appeared on Naïve toward the end of the 2000s, after which Erato became the principal partner. Characteristic examples of the group’s Baroque-rooted fusions are found on the 2014 album Music for a While: Improvisations on Purcell and the 2017 disc Handel Goes Wild. By then L’Arpeggiata, while remaining anchored in historical practice, had earned recognition as one of the most daring ensembles on the early music circuit. In 2019 Pluhar led the release of Himmelsmusik, which received a Grammy nomination. Subsequent distinctive programs on Alpha comprised Alla Napoletana (2021) and La Tarantella e un po'di follie (2022). For Erato the group accompanied countertenor Philippe Jaroussky on Passacalle de Follie in 2023 and, the following year, on Wonder Women, a program of seventeenth-century arias centered on women’s experiences.