Emma Kirkby and London Baroque here return to BIS with a disc of music from the French composer Michel Pignolet de Montéclair. An almost exact contemporary of François Couperin and only some 15 years older than Rameau, Montéclair was also a composer working in all the genres current at the time, including that of the chamber cantata for one or two voices and strings, dealing mainly with subjects from classical history or mythology. The large majority used French texts with four Italian ones, including La Morte di Lucretia, recorded here.

Gottfried Stölzel was a highly skilled, sometimes exceptionally inventive composer among whose gifts was the ability to devise extremely economical yet musically involving, textually illustrative, structurally refined, motivically fluent cantatas. It’s nowhere near great music, but much of it is quite good, clearly written for singers of some accomplishment, with leanly-scored yet often imaginatively colored orchestral accompaniments. Here are six cantatas from cycles written in 1735/36 and 1736/37, first performed together in pairs for Pentecost services in 1737. Added to the end of the program is another, earlier work that shows a marked stylistic contrast to the later pieces. Most of these cantatas begin with a short chorus, sometimes containing what sounds like a full-fledged fugue that dissolves as quickly as it begins, and then proceed through a couple of arias and recitatives, ending with a chorale.

Joseph Martin Kraus, also named as the "Swedish Mozart", has been many years a shadowy existence in music history. Gluck and even Joseph Haydn saw "a real genius" in his virtuose and nearly early-romantic works. His position as composer at the swedish court under Gustav III. made it possible to have a fix income and a blithe creativity. This CD-Set gives us an overall musical impression about his compositions in all genres: Beginning with the incidental music to Amphitryon, the high virtuos Italian Cantatas, his Symphonies from different life periods, till the early String Quartets- Gluck and Haydn have not been mistaken.

The Venetian poet Antonio Conti received from Marcello the commission for a dramatic text that allows a quick succession of events, rather than the usual succession of recitative and arias.
Cassandra plunges us into Homer’s Trojan War, with its namesake prophetess who has the gift of predicting the future, but whom no one believes. The many [25] extant copies of this cantata, here given its world première recording, testify to the impact it had in its own time.

Handel's arrival in Rome seems to have had a miraculous influence on his development as a composer. Something about the eternal city ignited the most productive period of his entire career: there Handel worked with some of the greatest musicians of the age and enjoyed the favours of major patrons of the arts. There he also witnessed the clerical aristocracy's sensual enjoyment of those very luxuries, excesses, and trappings of beauty that they professed to deny in their sermons. In Handel in Rome, Dunedin Consort and its director John Butt set out to convey Handel's response to this stimulating and somewhat paradoxical environment with three Italian cantatas. Winner of the Rising Talent award at the 2022 International Opera Awards, Nardus Williams is the star soprano.

Bononcini was a contemporary of Handel and for the few years he stayed in London the two men were - presumably - friendly rivals, as both had operas staged in turn (together with a few other composers) at the newly formed Royal Academy of Music. Bononcini was an exponent of the Arcadian style of Italian opera, Handel the high dramatic. It is very much that pastoral, Arcadian approach that is on display in the music on this CD.

In a new recording of music by Alessandro Scarlatti, Josetxu Obregóns La Ritirata parades its dazzling vocal and instrumental talents in presenting the four cantatas which involve recorders and violins, together with an additional standalone soprano aria, for a further Glossa Neapolitan-flavored release. Drawn from his well over 800 secular cantatas these works combine fully-integrated, imaginative recitatives, expressive and dramatic arias and colorful and exacting instrumental sinfonias and ritornelli into elegant and compact wholes, and featuring poetic texts which typically followed the aspirations of the Accademia degli Arcadi literary circle initiated in Rome around the turn of the eighteenth century.

What else can be traced and discovered from Handel’s lost music? Well, once again the Brook Street Band embark on their exciting quest with their fourth disc on AVIE, bringing music unheard since the time of Handel: English Cantatas and Songs.

Francesco Bartolomeo Conti (1682-1732) left his hometown Florence, in which he had already been a lute player under Kardinals Francesco Maria de Medici in his teens, with 19 he applied to the royal palace of Austria. He also worked in Bernlin, where he met Giovanni Bononcini, and London. 1708 Conti became royal theorbe player in Vienna, from 1713 he was royal composer, writing operas, oratories, cantatas, Musicae sacrae, and a few instrumental pieces. Both as a instrumentalist and composer Conti was able to succeed. Sadly today he still is one of the big unresearched composers.

The convent of St Francis in Assisi is a place of pilgrimage and the founding location of the Franciscan order. In the baroque period novices hoping to enter the order were trained in music, and there is a long musical tradition there. Most of the performances here are world premiere recordings of baroque vocal compositions from the library of the convent of St Francis in Assisi. All the vocal pieces are for soprano solo (combined with solo alto in Finale's `Oh Quam Jubilat'), and it is thought that the solos may have been sung by young men. Here they are taken by very fine female singers, and the accompanying ensemble is made up of top players.

Early in 1709 Antonio Caldara became maestro di cappella to the Marchese Francesco Maria Ruspoli in Rome. If the appointment brought new stability to his personal life, it also inspired him to remarkable creative effort. The two cantatas recorded here afford only a brief glimpse into a veritable musical treasure chest, the legacy of the seven years he held sway over an array of entertainments given by one of Rome's most lavish patrons of the arts.

During the eighteenth century the knowledge that the bassoon could very well rise up to the virtuosic spheres was reserved for only rather small circles of hearers. In April 1736 a new bassoon star in the person of Johann Christian Klotsch came from Zerbst to Darmstadt. Christoph Graupner must have been extremely delighted to work with this talented musician; Klotsch had only recently been under contract in Darmstadt when he was given multiple opportunities to demonstrate his bassoonist’s skill in the Sunday cantatas. Since Graupner loved to experiment with innovative tone colors, he increasingly placed the bassoon in the spotlight in his cantatas. This development reached its height in 1741 with bassoon parts of concerto character in sixteen different cantatas.

Acclaimed soprano Carolyn Sampson, partnered by Robert King and The King's Consort,with whom she has been associated throughout her professional career, turns her talents to Handel's two most dramatic cantatas, linked by the theme of abandoned women.

For more than two centuries Naples was a province of Spain, and after this ended in 1707 the remarkable cross-fertilisation of culture between them did not stop. Much of the Italian music featured here has been edited from sources in Spanish collections. The vast bulk of it is devoted to Leonardo Vinci (one of the most celebrated Italian opera composers of the 1720s). Only one short piece tacked onto the end is actually Spanish: a colourful fandango from José de Nebra's zarzuela Vendado es amor,no es ciego (1744) in which three singers mockingly compare the squabbling goddesses of classical antiquity to bickering mothers-in-law.

Georg Philipp Telemann remains one of the most fascinating and yet controversial composers of the Late Baroque. Some ridicule him for his prolific but reputedly superficial output while others view him as a universal musical genius. The cantatas by Telemann featured on this release provide an insight into over 50 years of creative activity. All works featured here were written for the Reformation Day and the feast of St Michael (29th September). Three of the five cantatas have a magnificent orchestration with trumpets and timpani. Performing these magnificent works are the acclaimed ensembles Kammerchor der Erloserkirche Bad Homburg and the Johann Rosenmuller Ensemble.