Ku io Caracciolo Andrea Riccardi

Italian composer Nicola Porpora is mainly a footnote in the history books these days, noted as Haydn's teacher, but in his day he was a rival to Handel and wrote a good deal of music for the celebrated castrato Carlo Broschi, aka, Farinelli. That music is sampled here by the startlingly soprano-like French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky, and listeners are likely to feel that it's been unjustly neglected. Jaroussky sounds great, his creamy voice sailing through the mostly tuneful pieces. There are also a few big showpieces of the sort that Renée Fleming and others have recorded on their Baroque aria albums.

Giuseppe Giordani (1639–1703) and Alessandro Melani (1751–1798) were both extremely successful opera composers, but both were firmly in the service of the Catholic Church throughout their lives. With the works on this CD, soprano Katrin Küsswetter impressively demonstrates how transparent the boundaries were between secular and sacred music in the Baroque and early Classical periods. The sparse instrumentation provides the voice with plenty of creative freedom, which gives a good impres-sion of how this music may have sounded like in the composers' lifetimes.