Cristina Comencini Lucy

The four Salve Regina recordings presented on this uniquely compiled new album cross the boundary between opera house and church a boundary that in 18th-century Naples was never very forbidding to begin with. In fact, Leo, Pergolesi and Porpora are all fine examples of composers who moved with unselfconscious facility between sacred and secular genres, between old counterpoint and the Monteverdian stile concertato that caressed each word with sensuous melismas and velvet harmonies. Porpora was a noted singing teacher of his day, intimately familiar with everything that a voice can do, and possessing a melodic skill that spins long and ornate vocal phrases of almost instrumental effect.

Monteverdi's larger choral pieces are so masterly that they tend to overshadow his chamber scale sacred music the solo works in particular. Occasionally one or two of these exquisite motets will appear on a collection such as Paul McCreesh's Venetian Vespers, but rarely do they become the focus of an entire recording as they are here. The much-admired early-music diva Maria Cristina Kiehr has a slightly constricted quality to her voice that won't appeal to everyone, but her very narrow vibrato colors her sound without affecting her accuracy of pitch, spotless coloratura, or blend with period instruments (played beautifully here by Concerto Soave).

In attempting to select something from the vast pool of solo cantatas left behind by Alessandro Scarlatti, it's hard to know what to highlight. Argentine soprano Maria Cristina Kiehr, a prominent European early music specialist who honed her craft in the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis under René Jacobs, casts in her lot with both the elder Scarlatti and Concerto Soave in a recital consisting of three of the elder Scarlatti's solo cantatas in Harmonia Mundi's Alessandro Scarlatti: Bella madre de' fiori.

In addition to his symphonic recordings, Berglund also recorded concertos by Shostakovich with Tortelier and Ortiz. The album also includes the piano solo "Three Fantasy Dances", recorded in 1973-1975.