The release of the new recording project E-MOTION, performed by La Madrileña under the direction of José Antonio Montaño and featuring the mezzo-soprano Lucía Caihuela, represents the culmination of a long-term project dedicated to the recovery of 18th-century operatic repertoire.
Released by Eudora Records and supported by the Leonardo Grants from the BBVA Foundation, the project presents a wide selection of arias —most of them previously unpublished and written for castrati— drawn from an extensive corpus of operas with librettos by Metastasio, the most influential librettist of his time. The album also includes two outstanding and unique overtures from these operas, likewise unpublished: Demofoonte by Johann Adolph Hasse (1758) and Semiramide riconosciuta by Niccolò Jommelli (1753). The programme is completed with works by other prominent 18th-century composers such as Pietro A. Guglielmi, Luigi Gatti, Egidio Duni, and Leonardo Vinci.
Each of the works included in E-MOTION has been selected as part of a long-term musicological research project linked to the Didone Project of the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales at the Complutense University of Madrid. Thanks to this work, carried out by specialists such as Álvaro Torrente, Ana Llorens, and José Antonio Montaño himself, it has been possible to recover, edit, and perform a repertoire that had remained largely unknown for centuries.
In this way, E-MOTION becomes a project that goes beyond the purely discographic sphere, acting as a bridge between research and artistic creation, offering a new reading of the European operatic heritage from a historically informed and interpretatively rigorous perspective, while remaining fully alive in the present.