Orlando furioso never ceased to exert its pull on the Baroque imagination. With “Furioso”, Xavier Sabata, Le Concert de l’Hostel Dieu and Franck-Emmanuel Comte offer a concentrated journey through it, in which Ariosto’s hero appears by turns as knight, lost lover, figure of fury and wavering soul. An album built like an inner theatre. 
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Released on Aparté, Furioso brings together excerpts from operas by Vivaldi, Handel, Steffani, Fux and Porpora around the myth of Orlando furioso. The programme does not seek to tell the whole epic, but rather to follow its breaking points: chivalric heroism, wounded love, the loss of reason, outbursts of violence and moments of lament. Recitatives, arias and instrumental pieces answer one another like fragments of a single psychological portrait.
The choice of the countertenor Xavier Sabata gives this journey a distinctive colour. Trained in theatre before studying singing, the Catalan artist brings to these scenes of madness and abandonment a keen sense of dramatic speech. Alongside him, Le Concert de l’Hostel Dieu, under the direction of Franck-Emmanuel Comte, avoids the feel of a mere anthology: the excerpts, drawn from Porpora’s L’Angelica, Handel’s Orlando, Vivaldi’s Orlando furioso, Steffani’s Orlando generoso and Fux’s Angelica vincitrice di Alcina, form a true arc, moving between fury, vertigo and desolation. Two pieces by Fux are also given their world premiere recording.
The strength of Furioso lies precisely in the way it tightens Ariosto’s vast material around a character in crisis. The album highlights the virtuosity of Baroque singing without detaching it from what drives it: the instability of a hero whom love pushes beyond himself. A compact, theatrical and deeply inhabited journey through one of the great myths of love-driven madness.
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