（Photo Credit: Hanno Meier)

Inside the austere, echoing stone of Regensburg’s 12th-century Romanesque Schottenkirche, Barbara Strozzi’s music found a space as resonant and complex as the woman herself. The Hathor Consort, directed by Romina Lischka, and sopranos Dorothee Mields and Hana Blažíková transformed the church’s cool stillness into a charged atmosphere of intimacy and theatrical depth. They allowed her music to breathe, ache, and seduce.

The curated program — five acts named for the muses — offered narrative clarity and emotional momentum. Each section centered around a distinct expressive nucleus: spiritual awe (Kalliope), sensuality (Erato), betrayal and sorrow (Melpomene), inward silence (Euterpe), and finally, fiery self-assertion (Thalia). The flow between vocal and instrumental pieces created a dramaturgy of breath and pulse. The ensemble approached the concert as a single evolving gesture — a portrait-in-motion of a woman who, through her music, had already dramatized herself.

Mields and Blažíková, famed in 17th century vocal music, brought both stylistic precision and extraordinary vocal synergy. Their voices — one rounder and earthier, the other silvery and crystalline— intertwined with the fluid ease of long-time chamber partners. Whether exchanging sighs in the duet “Sospira, respira” or echoing each other’s anguish in “L’Amante segreto,” they embodied the kind of mutual trust that invites risk, embraces silence, and welcomes surprise. Moments of vocal blend emerged that felt more like a shared breath.

Their stage presence reinforced this musical rapport as well: relaxed, grounded, and focused not on individual display but on shared storytelling. There were glances, subtle gestures, and an unhurried tempo in their physicality that made the entire performance feel conversational. In many pieces — “L’Eraclito amoroso,” for instance — they leaned into the dramatic arc with an opera actor’s sense of timing, letting the text unfold in natural speech rhythms that made Strozzi’s poetry feel astonishingly present.

Equally striking was their command of silence. Mields and Blažíková, both masters of vocal nuance, shaped the space between notes as expressively as the musical lines themselves — wielding pauses like dramatic gestures, gripping the listener through presence and poise. 

Hathor Consort, with its core of viols, harp, theorbo, and organ, provided a sonic fabric of astonishing suppleness. Particularly memorable was how the viola da gamba section — played by Lischka herself — did not merely accompany but conversed with the voice, echoing its speech-like inflections or answering its ornaments with sighs of their own. In the instrumental interludes that separated the five acts, the gambas sang like human voice. These pieces allowed the instrumentalists to carry the dramatic thread forward with as much rhetorical vitality as the singers. It was not difficult to forget there were no words.

Beginning just before midnight, this late-night concert felt more like a private musical gathering witnessing the excellent artistry of Strozzi. Within the quiet mass of Romanesque architecture, the voices of Mields and Blažíková crafted a vivid portrait of this exceptional woman composer, inviting the listeners to dialog with her. And through them, Barbara Strozzi — as the fervent, searching woman herself — spoke again, through breath, vulnerability, and the living body of performance.