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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.

It is hard to fathom how Franz Schubert’s career as a composer lasted only a decade when we consider how extraordinarily prolific it was. And it is ever more astonishing that the evolution of his language would be so immense, guided by harmonic and structural explorations that would have continued well into the nineteenth-century – were it not that death untimely claimed him at age thirty-one. Penned in March 1817, when Schubert was twenty years old, the Sonata in A Minor D 537 is the first successful effort in the genre, having been written after a number of attempts either as multi-movement compositions that often lack a closing rondo, or as standalone movements in sonata or A-B-A form that are today understood as abandoned projects. The opening movement proposes an original approach to key relations, with the second theme in the key of F major and a recapitulation in the key of D minor.