Queen Christina

Queen Christina opens Concerto Copenhagen‘s new series exploring the tides of Scandinavian Baroque music with a portrait, in sound, of one of the 17th century’s most extraordinary rulers. Christina of Sweden — crowned at six, self-educated in law, philosophy, and seven languages, and famous for abdicating her throne at 28 to convert to Catholicism and reinvent herself as Rome’s most influential musical patron — assembled around her the composers who effectively invented the trio sonata and the early concerto grosso: Corelli (her favorite instrumentalist, who dedicated his Op. 1 trio sonatas to her), Alessandro Scarlatti, Bernardo Pasquini, and Alessandro Stradella.

The program traces her musical life geographically and chronologically: French-style Swedish court dances from her Stockholm youth under her hovkapellmästare Andreas Düben, a virtuosic sonata by the English gambist William Young whom she met in Innsbruck en route to Rome, and the Roman-circle repertoire of Corelli, Scarlatti, Pasquini, and Stradella that defined her later salon — capped by an instrumental arrangement of a Gesualdo madrigal she was known to have loved. Recorded at Garnisons Kirke in Copenhagen under Lars Ulrik Mortensen, the album captures both the political and the emotional daring of a woman Pope Alexander VII once dismissed as “a queen without a realm, a Christian without faith, and a woman without shame.”

Concerto Copenhagen
Lars Ulrik Mortensen – direction, harpsichord, organ