Gramophone has praised Spanish baroque violinist Cristina Prats Costa’s recording debut, Spiritillo Mediterraneo, with critic Charlotte Gardner calling the result, complete with tight ensemble relationships, a polished solo debut.
The review notes that Prats Costa, who has played with top period ensembles including The English Concert, Il Pomo d’Oro, and Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, recently won the Baroque Music Prize at the Manhattan International Music Competition. Inspired by Falconieri’s Il Spiritillo Brando, the album explores the sound world of 17th- and early 18th-century Mediterranean music, drawing on composers including Sanz, Murcia, Nebra, Biber, Rebel, and Vivaldi.
Gramophone highlights several standout moments, including Nebra’s Seguidillas as a daintily fiery highlight among Prats Costa’s own arrangements, and Lucas Harris’s guitar solo shining within Sanz’s Españoleta. The review also singles out her interpretation of Matteis’s English melancholy, praising her curvaceous, ornamented lines, alongside the texturally pared-back stillness of Schop’s arrangement of the Striggio madrigal Nasce la pena mia.
Spiritillo Mediterraneo is out now on PENTATONE.
