Cristina Miatello (soprano), Gian Paolo Fagotto (tenor), Ensemble Aurora/Enrico Gatti Glossa GCD 921205 (two CDs) ***

There’s plenty of music written for Holy Week, but I’d hazard a guest that not many music lovers know Alessandro Scarlatti’s contribution from the first decade of the 18th century. He set six of the nine tenebrae for solo voice and strings, five for soprano, one for tenor.

The musical writing is contained, even austere, as if Scarlatti wanted to find purity of expressive yield through the plainest of means. In other words, this is a setting in which the music fully matches the gravity of the texts, with leavening provided through mentions of hope or the setting of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which allow for melismatic treatment.

With plaintive vocal contributions, Ensemble Aurora’s 1992 performance only occasionally presses beyond the composer’s careful boundaries.

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