Fabio Bonizzoni, one of Baroque music performance leading conductors of our time, and his group La Risonanza make their debut on Challenge Classics with Dido and Aeneas, Purcell's operatic masterpiece. It is coupled with The Love of Mars and Venus by John Eccles and Gottfried Finger, Purcell's near contemporaries. Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, composed in the 1680s, is arguably the most beloved and best-known opera in English. Bonizzoni says: "The charm of this opera is in that it contains everything, like Cervantes' Don Quixote: any life experience is within it. Love, hate, death, dream, despair, the innocent and the wicked play.

Fabio Bonizzoni returns with his long-awaited new recording of Handel’s 'Aci, Galatea e Polifemo'. Who better to team up with Bonizzoni, performing the role of the luckless shepherd Aci, than scintillating soprano Roberta Invernizzi. Her captivating contributions to Glossa's Handel series with La Risonanza as well as her 'I Viaggi di Faustina' have drawn powerful critical plaudits, including more than one disc of the Month.

Johann Caspar Kerll (1627-1693) worked mainly in Vienna during the 17th century and was a pupil of Carissimi and teacher of Pachelbel, thus belonging within the line of succession culminating in Johann Sebastian Bach, who much admired his music. Eighteen masses by Kerll have survived of which only one, the first, a 5-part Requiem, is written a cappella, in the so-called old style. All the others are written in style concertato, that is, with soloists, one or more full choirs, various instruments (violins, violas, trombones) and continuo.

Luigi Rossi (ca. 1597 - 20 February 1653) was an Italian Baroque composer. Rossi was born in Torremaggiore, a small town near Foggia, in the ancient kingdom of Naples and at an early age he went to Naples. There he studied music with the Franco-Flemish composer Jean de Macque who was organist of the Santa Casa dell’Annunziata and maestro di cappella to the Spanish viceroy. Rossi later entered the service of the Caetanis, dukes of Traetta.

Haendel n’a que 21 ans lorsqu’il quitte l’Allemagne pour l’Italie. C’est pour répondre à l’invitation du prince Jean Gaston de Medicis qu’il arrive à Rome en 1706 possédant déjà une culture musicale influencée par les courants italiens. Ces années en Italie seront des années de pur bonheur, il y fera la connaissance de Corelli et des Scarlatti, n’hésitant pas à se mesurer à Domenico dans une joute musicale dont il triomphera.

For the final volume in Fabio Bonizzoni’s survey of cantatas written by Handel during his stay in Italy, the background scenery moves – like a reflection of the Grand Tour – from Rome to Naples; probably the troubled times in a Rome besieged by Imperial troops during the War of the Spanish Succession may have encouraged the young, itinerant Saxon musician to consider that heading down south was safer and more conducive for his overall career prospects.

The Accademia degli Arcadi - that thought-provoking and ideas-creating literary circle set up by a group of poets, composers, aristocrats and churchmen, which championed a return to classical (and pastoral) ideals and one of whose keenest members was the Marquis Francesco Maria Ruspoli, Handel’s patron in Rome - forms the aesthetic background for this sixth and penultimate release in the series of Italian cantatas by the Saxon composer which Fabio Bonizzoni and La Risonanza are making for Glossa. In an engrossing essay written by Carlo Vitali (which additionally benefits from the counsels of Michael Talbot), the listener/reader is introduced to the social and political references contained within the pastoral texts of Olinto, pastore arcade, Duello amoroso and Alpestre monte, the three Handel cantatas which make up this CD.

In May 1707 George Frideric Handel entered into the service of the Marquis Francesco Maria Ruspoli, and under his protection, embarked upon a tremendous career. As well as making a name for himself as a spectacular virtuoso on the harpsichord and organ, through his plentiful concerts in the Roman academies, Handel lost no time in also becoming a highly sought-after composer through his felicitous and apparently inexhaustible inspiration. In addition to a significant number of cantatas for solo voice and basso continuo, Handel also involved himself in composing cantatas for larger numbers of voices, combining these with a large supporting orchestral group.

Two new voices join Fabio Bonizzoni's project of recording the entirety of the cantatas with instrumental accompaniment which Handel composed when in Italy: sopranos Nuria Rial and Maria Grazia Schiavo enter the compan of Roberta Invernizzi, Emanuela Galli, Raffaella Milanesi and Salvo Vitale, the singers who we have been able to hear in the first three volumes of the collection. In this fourth instalment (out of a total of seven CDs planned for release up to the end of 2009), we rediscover the patronage of the Marquis Francesco Maria Ruspoli, which lay behind the important cantata a due entitled Aminta e Fillide; this was a work which was to provide the composer with a veritable seam of musical material for use, as "borrowings", in his operas Agrippina and Rinaldo - one of the reasons perhaps why this cantata has been rarely performed and even less recorded.

In the third instalment in Fabio Bonizzoni’s survey of the secular cantatas with instrumental accompaniment composed by Georg Frideric Handel during his stay in Italy, come a quartet of works associated with the Venice-born maecenas Pietro Ottoboni – including the substantial Ero e Leandro, the libretto for which is plausibly considered to have been written by the Cardinal Ottoboni himself. As well as the seldom-performed cantata for bass, Spande ancora a mio dispetto and Ah! Crudel, nel pianto mio scored forsoprano solo, Bonizzoni also directs the Spanish-texted Nose emendará jamás.

In the autumn of last year Fabio Bonizzoni and La Risonanza embarked on a journey taking a fresh look – musicologically as well as musically – at the chamber cantatas to Italian texts and with instrumental accompaniment composed by Georg Frideric Handel during his stay in Italy. Where the first release on Glossa focused on works associated with Cardinal Pamphili in Rome, this new recording contains pieces – including the dramatic cantata Armida abbandonata and Handel’s ‘own’ Hunt Cantata – originating in the establishment of the Marquis Ruspoli and written for sopranos such asMargherita Durastante and Vittoria Tarquini.

George Frideric Handel’s Duetti da camera from La Risonanza represent a welcome extension of the ensemble’s award-winning series of Handel solo cantatas on Glossa, and come with the luxurious vocal pairing of Roberta Invernizzi and Marina De Liso.

The chamber cantata flourished in Italy as a counterpart to public opera and oratorio, cultivated by aristocratic patrons for their personal enjoyment. Perhaps because of its essentially private origins, this pervasive Baroque form remains little known today. During his years in Italy (1706-1710), George Frideric Handel composed nearly 100 cantatas for a series of important patrons, but they have tended to be passed over in favour of his larger operas, oratorios, concertos and orchestral suites.

Capella Cracoviensis, recently discovered on the Alpha release Te Deum, returns here under the direction of Fabio Bonizzoni. Together they present a highly vigorous reading of these monumental works - Their virtuosity brings out to the full the magnificent counterpoint while never neglecting the text, so vital in the motet genre.

By the time that Alessandro Scarlatti was writing the two serenatas recorded here by Fabio Bonizzoni and La Risonanza and inaugurating an exciting new series on Glossa, that celebratory cantata form, often employing allegorical characters, had been in existence for a mere half century. Scarlatti, as Bonizzoni says, “was one of the main sources of inspiration for Handel whilst the latter was in Italy, and this creates a real continuity with what we have been doing in the recent past”; notably the much-admired septet of recordings devoted to the Saxon composers Italian chamber cantatas.