It’s well known that Vivaldi wrote more than 500 concertos and Domenico Scarlatti as many keyboard sonatas.
But among their 18th-century contemporaries they were not alone in their outputs. Domenico’s father Alessandro Scarlatti and Benedetto Marcello, to name just two, knocked out several hundred cantatas each.
No one has dusted off the rare specimens of the genre in the Italian archives of the Settecento more conscientiously than Adrian Chandler, who set up his ensemble La Serenissima to bring such pieces to life. This programme offered two revelations. The first was Arianna Abbandonata by Marcello, generally forgotten these days but a nobleman whose wealth let him be quirkily adventurous in his scoring — he had no patron to please. Ariadne’s abandonment is eloquently expressed in an aria that in its urgency avoids the conventional da capo repeat.
The second revelation was the even more neglected Giovanni Alberto Ristori, whose Didone Abbandonata, from the late 1740s, opens in almost Mozartian style but plumbs the depths of Dido’s grief in an aria worthy of Handel. These two works eclipsed the efforts of the better known Scarlatti and Vivaldi in the first half.
