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Handel’s marvelous 1735 opera dramatizes characters from an Italian epic poem by Ludovico Ariosto that was wildly popular as well as influential in the Renaissance and Baroque eras.

Joined by four other players and the sopranos Mariana Flores and Julie Roset — alternately feather-soft and piercingly strong — Alarcón offers 90 minutes of d’India, anchored by two grand laments from abandoned women, Virgil’s Dido and Ariosto’s Olympia.

“Those murals belong to the people,” says Ariosto Otero, who helped establish En Defensa del Patrimonio del Centro SCOP, a preservation group consisting of artists, intellectuals and preservationists.

After photojournalist David Ariosto went to Cuba in 2009 for CNN, how could he not write a book?

Ariosto’s perspective offers clues to why Cuba remains poised on modernity’s cusp.