Addio Amore began as a dream deferred: soprano Jeanine De Bique and countertenor Terry Wey first discovered their voices’ rare chemistry rehearsing side by side as Giulio Cesare and Cleopatra in early 2020, only for the production to be cancelled days before its dress rehearsal by the onset of Covid-19. Years later, with Kammerorchester Basel, that “little dream” finally became this album — a program built entirely around the theme of farewell, drawing on arias and duets by Handel, Hasse, Porpora, Giacomelli, Albinoni, and Torelli, several of them world premiere recordings.

As musicologist Giovanni Andrea Sechi’s liner notes explore, the program takes its cue from Pier Francesco Tosi’s 1723 treatise on singing and its lament for the fading art of “pathetic” (deeply expressive) singing — then traces how departure, separation, and farewell became opera seria’s most fertile ground for exactly that expressive intensity, from Handel’s Rinaldo to Porpora’s reworkings of arias Farinelli himself once sang. Recorded at the Musik- und Kulturzentrum Don Bosco Basel, the album pairs two singers whose long-postponed collaboration lends the whole program an unusually personal resonance.

Jeanine De Bique – soprano
Terry Wey – countertenor
Julia Schröder & Antonio Viñuales – violin
Kammerorchester Basel