In the labyrinth of the Baroque theatre, where words become gesture and music turns into the language of the soul, the Tragedie Cristiane of 1729 occupy a singular and almost mythical territory: an experiment intertwining devotion and drama, Jesuit pedagogy and Neapolitan refinement, in an age when musical theatre was seeking a new moral and formal identity. The recording project released by Passacaille, entrusted to the ensemble Stile Galante under the direction of Stefano Aresi, restores life and coherence to a dispersed corpus, to a conception of musical theatre that aimed to reconcile feeling and reason, sacred speech and bodily theatricality. The album is not a mere anthology of arias or fragments: it reconstructs a way of thinking about music as a representation of interiority, far from operatic splendour yet no less impassioned in its spiritual impulse.

The year 1729, which gives the project its title, marks a threshold of maturity for the Neapolitan world. The so-called Scuola partenopea had by then forged a recognisable language, founded on the balance between rhetoric and natural song, on recitative bending toward melodic grace, and on the use of dissonance as an instrument of affect. Tragedie Cristiane belongs to that horizon, yet also reveals its inner tension: an art seeking to reconcile the drama of opera seria with a spiritual content no longer didactic but contemplative. Hence the work becomes a “theatrical experiment”: a theatre of word and gesture, where faith turns into drama and drama into a form of knowledge.

The approach of Stefano Aresi and his ensemble is of rare musicological refinement. This recording does not pretend to reconstruct a lost event, but to convey its living tension. The interpretation never indulges in the picturesque nor in gratuitous ornament: here ornamentation is language, not decoration. Stile Galante—a genuine workshop of collective intelligence—plays with a balance that fuses clarity and passion, alternating lightness of touch with timbral density, according to a theatrical logic that entrusts every gesture to the meaning of the word. The sound image stands out for its transparency, allowing the listener to perceive the subtle interplay between voice and continuo, bow and breath, restoring that Baroque mimesis in which everything lives by analogy.

The carefully chosen voices embody the emotional variety of the project. Ann Hallenberg brings to her line a luminous gravity, a noble phrasing that unites authority and intimacy. Her dark timbre, wisely controlled, conveys pain and composure in equal measure, avoiding any risk of rhetoric. Francesca Cassinari, with her brighter and more vibrant colour, restores the freshness of characters morally pure yet never naïve: her clear emission and mastery of half-tones yield moments of genuine theatrical suspension. Valeria La Grotta, returning here after other successes, contributes a disciplined and radiant singing: her voice moves like a harp modulating words into gold, with restraint that avoids all pathos. It is an art of control, where technique becomes transparency and emotion relies on the purity of sound.

Within this framework, Giuseppina Bridelli enters with a singularly aware profile, able to transform recitative into an act of thought. Her voice, warm yet never opulent, unfolds like a breath accompanying the text without forcing it, as if meditating upon it in real time. Bridelli does not perform the tragedy—she contemplates it: she restores to the word its sonic dignity and to music its power to express the ineffable. In her most intense passages—particularly where the drama pauses to let silence speak—she shows how eighteenth-century Christian theatre could become a space of inner truth without resorting to clamour. It is a performance of maturity and measure, perfectly consistent with Aresi’s interpretive vision.

Yet the recording’s deepest merit lies not only in the quality of the individual singers, but in the very idea of “experiment” through which Aresi reactivates an ancient European vocation of music. Each piece becomes a fragment of a broader moral discourse, a dramaturgy built through contrasts, following the Baroque logic of the “opposition of affections.” The direction, precise and engaged, avoids any philological rigidity: the aim is not to demonstrate but to let words live in time. Stefano Aresi’s gesture is measured, almost invisible, yet perceptible in his constant attention to form and breathing—a discreet authority that guides without imposing.

Listening to the entire set yields a surprising sense of unity despite the variety of composers. This is because the project is not built upon the sum of individual pieces but upon their inner relationship: each aria, recitative, and instrumental movement contributes to a single emotional architecture. One perceives, in filigree, the echoes of Durante, Porpora, Vinci, and Hasse—voices that converse rather than stand apart. It is a theatre of memory, where plurality turns into coherence and music assumes the role of moral commentary.

The Passacaille sound, always attentive to natural presence and spatial depth, enhances this balance. The acoustic setting, never artificially reverberant, lets the texture of timbres and the ensemble’s breathing emerge. One perceives the intention to offer both an intellectual and a sensorial experience—an education of the ear to subtlety. Even the editorial apparatus—notes, booklet, translations—is prepared with the same sensitivity guiding the performance, turning the album into an object of study as well as aesthetic enjoyment.

From a historical viewpoint, Tragedie Cristiane belongs to that moment when sacred music assumed the colours of theatre and theatre sought moral legitimacy through faith. It stands at a point of contact between aesthetics and theology, between body and grace. The notion of “Christian tragedy,” born in Jesuit circles, here becomes a laboratory of humanity: the characters are no longer abstract models of virtue or guilt, but beings crossed by doubt, desire, and awareness of limitation. Music translates all this into gestures of rare intensity, and the performance by Stile Galante conveys such complexity with clarity that moves more than emphasis ever could.

Aesthetically, the listening experience invites a broader reflection on the function of Baroque music today. This is not a matter of re-enactment or pure philology; it is an act of thought. Bringing these Tragedie Cristiane to light means remembering that art is not only beauty but knowledge mediated by time—and that ancient sound continues to question the present. In this sense, Passacaille’s undertaking belongs to a line of rediscovery that is also an ethical choice: giving voice back to a past that speaks the language of the future, restoring to music its meditative purpose.

Throughout the listening, what strikes one is not the diversity of composers but the continuity of spirit. It is as though each author had contributed to a single vision: that of an inner theatre where grace becomes drama and drama turns into prayer. Stile Galante translates this vision into a clear, coherent sonorous matter, traversed by a collective intelligence reminiscent of the purest chamber practice. It is an example of how philology can become emotion, of how technical precision can coincide with poetry.