A. Scarlatti: Cantatas & Recorder Concertos

Having worked with countless luminaries of early-music performance over the last three decades, Roberta Invernizzi has become renowned for a crystalline soprano and an unfailing dramatic sense in Baroque and pre-Baroque music, especially from her native Italy. Here she lends distinction to a unique collection of three cantatas and two concertos by the jewel in the crown of Baroque-era music from Naples, Alessandro Scarlatti. Bella dama di nome Santa and Ardo è ver per te d'amore are particularly brilliant examples of the cantatas written for solo voice and obbligato instrument - in this case the recorder. The violin is the instrument assigned to duet with Invernizzi in the intensely expressive Quella pace gradita, which in this case does not vie with the soprano - as it does with the recorder in the previous two Cantatas - but rather accompanies the voice. Like the cantatas, the two concertos here date from the turn of the 17th to the 18th centuries: four-movement works of scintillating virtuosity, fully the equal of Vivaldi's better-known examples, but laid out like a brief sonata with a brief introduction to a well-worked fugue, followed by a songful slow movement and brilliant finale. Under the direction of it's founder, Stefano Bagliano, the Collegium Pro Musica has assembled a distinguished discography on Brilliant Classics which has attracted international praise. Their album of Quantz concertos (BC95386) was reviewed in Fanfare as 'very fine - technically accomplished, and both lively and characterful, without turning mannered.' Of their collection of chamber concertos by Vivaldi (BC94332), Musica dei donum commented: 'imaginative and lively, dramatic when needed, but also have intimacy, whenever the music asks for it... The virtuosic solo passages are perfectly executed.'