The Four Nations Ensemble - Caldara: Cantatas, Sonatas for Two Violins & Continuo (2004)

This very agreeable disc samples the two chamber genres favoured by Antonio Caldara, prolific writer of operas and oratorios in Venice, Rome and Vienna. The sonatas are essentially in the Corelli mould of sonate da camera, but half a generation on – more regular in their patterns, rather perkier in their manner, their counterpoint always beautifully dovetailed. I don’t detect a specially original voice behind them, but the music is always pleasingly and elegantly formed. Four of the 12 sonatas of his Op 2 are recorded here, including the last of the set, which in the Corelli tradition is an extended ground-bass movement, and is carried off with a lot of ingenuity. There is wit, too, in some of these pieces: try for example the sparkling little Corrente from No 8. The Four Nations Ensemble play them with real feeling for the idiom as well as impeccable technique, and the recorded sound is bright and true.

It is principally as a vocal composer that Caldara is known (he wrote over 80 operas or serenatas and some 45 oratorios) and Jennifer Lane, possessor of a full and warmly musical voice, makes the most of his graceful and shapely lines while always giving due weight and sense to the words. There is plenty of appealing, if again not specially distinctive, music in the three cantatas here that are, I believe, not previously recorded on CD (try for example the first aria in La fama), but the gem is Vicino a un rivoletto, where the first of the arias has a violin obbligato – I’m not sure whether it represents the birds, the flowers or the streams of the text, but it really doesn’t matter – and the second a cello, which, exquisitely played by Loretta O’Sullivan, unmistakably represents the heart swooning with pain, and coupled with Lane’s singing does so to very moving effect.