The release of the first single from the new recording project E-MOTION, performed by La Madrileña under the direction of José Antonio Montaño and featuring mezzo-soprano Lucía Caihuela, marks the beginning of a work dedicated to the recovery of 18th-century operatic repertoire. Released by Eudora Records and supported by the Leonardo Grants of the BBVA Foundation, this project presents a selection of arias—mostly previously unpublished and written for castrati—drawn from a large corpus of operas with librettos by Metastasio.
The single, Barbaro, non comprendo, by Johann Adolf Hasse, is taken from the opera Adriano in Siria (1752) and stands as a representative example of the expressive intensity characteristic of opera seria. The work highlights compositional devices such as the descending chromatic progression in the ritornello, which emphasizes the character’s dramatic tension in a moment of emotional confrontation.
This release is part of a long-term musicological research initiative linked to the Didone Project at the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Thanks to the work of specialists such as Álvaro Torrente, Ana Llorens, and José Antonio Montaño himself, it has been possible to recover, edit, and bring to life a repertoire that had largely remained unpublished. In this way, E-MOTION serves as a bridge between research and artistic creation, highlighting European operatic heritage from a rigorous historical and interpretive perspective.