Arie Antiche – a magical word for all who desire to enter into one of the most fascinating and powerful of musical traditions: the Italian bel canto, the realization of the artistic ideal of the natural beauty of the human voice in song. And who better to represent this ideal than Spanish soprano Maria Bayo. This, the first of Maria Bayo’s recordings for Claves Records, earned immediate recognition from critics, including receiving the «Vierteljahresliste des Deutschen Schallplattenpreises».

L’Empio Punito is a dramma per musica in three acts composed by Alessandro Melani, on a libretto by Giovanni Filippo Apolloni, based on Filippo Acciaiuoli’s adaptation of El burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de piedra (1616) by Tirso da Molina. It was premiered in 1669 and this release features the first performance in modern times that took place at Teatro di Villa Torlonia in Rome in October 2019, 350 years after its debut. Acrimante, the male protagonist of l’Empio Punito, can be considered the first Don Giovanni in the history of opera. His seductive power brings chaos and pain in the lives of the other characters but a lot of energy as well. Although Melani was at the beginning of his career as an operatic composer – he wrote mainly sacred music – in L’empio punito he proves to be very skilful in alternating lyrical moments and pure recitative, and in introducing at the right moment dramatic recitatives that interrupt the course of the arias.

Alessandro Melani (1639-1703) was a prolific author of cantatas: we know of some thirty works, many of them written for solo soprano and concertante trumpet, some with the accompaniment of strings and basso continuo and others yet with the only support of basso continuo. Our CD presents six such cantatas some of which - for example Quai bellici accenti - are relatively well-known, while others are less popular although of equally high musical standard. The soprano Rosita Frisani gives of them a fine interpretation, full of virtuosity and beautiful nuances, well supported by the Alessandro Stradella Consort conducted by Estevan Velardi, who has long devoted himself to 17th- and 18th-century Italian music.