The countertenor Randall Scotting’s debut album on Signum Records – with Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, conducted by Laurence Cummings – explores repertoire composed for the (in)famous countertenor Senesino, featuring works by composers including Ariosti, Oralandini, Giocomelli and Gaj.

A dramatically persuasive and intensely musical interpreter, Randall is recognized for winning over audiences with his stunning vocal beauty, stylish singing, and charismatic stage presence. He has become a sought-after artist by some of the world’s most esteemed opera houses. Recent performances include the Royal Opera House, the Metropolitan Opera, and the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. A distinctive ensemble playing on period-specific instruments, The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s values are to question, challenge and trailblaze. They have worked with conductors including Elder, Rattle, Jurowski, Iván Fischer and John Butt. There’s no orchestra quite like this one.

WATCH THIS LIVE Q+A WITH RANDALL SCOTTING, PRODUCED IN COLLABORATION WITH ARKIVMUSIC!

Giovanni Bononcini was born in Modena on 18 July 1670, the eldest and best-known son of the composer, violinist and theoretician Giovanni Maria (1642-1678), one of the main exponents of the musical school of Modena in the second half of the seventeenth century. His talent was extremely precocious: in 1685 he published Trattenimenti da camera op. 1, Concerti da camera op. 2 and Sinfonie op. 3. Giovanni Bononcini is known above all for his dramatic and vocal chamber music, whose simple, refined intensity of expression was acknowledged by his contemporaries. The cantatas are formed of the prescribed succession of arias (or duets) and recitativos, and show Bononcini’s outstanding expressive skill and his ability in finely crafting the close relationship between words and music that was required by this genre of chamber music because of the need to “further the feeling of that divine poetry by means of the expression of the harmonious melodies” (as he wrote in a letter to Benedetto Marcello from London on 6 April 1725). This ability of his made it possible for him, through his perfect knowledge of counterpoint, to tastefully adjust “the exact observation of the different moods produced in the soul by the different modulations of the sound, so as to be able to adapt them suitably to the needs of the words”. Within this world premiere recording the Aurata Fonte ensemble is performing the manuscripts of a composer whose talent was recognized and affirmed by a great career throughout Europe.

Pergolesi is the author of the most famously affecting setting of the 12th-century hymn by Jacopone di Todi in which Mary is depicted at the foot of the cross, mourning the death of her son in graphically detailed poetry which has been a gift to musicians ever since. In fact Brilliant Classics has collected up all the versions of Stabat mater by composers of any renown from the last 600 years and issued them in a brand-new all-inclusive release. Within that release is a new recording of the Stabat mater by Antonio Maria Bononcini, who died just a decade before Pergolesi. Their settings are on a roughly similar scale, though Bononcini’s is slightly grander, using four singers to Pergolesi’s two, and dividing the text into even more sections. Bononcini himself should not be confused with his father Giovanni Maria (composer and violinist) or indeed his brother Giovanni, all three of them outstanding composers of the Modenese school. Antonio made his name in Vienna, where he was appointed composer to the court of Emperor Joseph I in 1710, and one may hear why from the restrained pathos of this Stabat mater, with its slowly-modulating grand choruses of great tension and its arias which suspend time with contemplation of a particular aspect of Christ’s agony on the Cross. The Stabat mater is complemented here by a much less-familiar sacred cantata, Dio e la vergine: an anonymous six-movement text in which Mary stands before her Lord and proclaims her love for him, and He for her; a surprisingly common trope of 18th-century oratorios where God himself was given a part. The only other recording of this cantata is considerably older in style; this new one is made by the stylish Alessandro Stradella Consort, who produced for Brilliant the well-received recording of an oratorio by Alessandro Scarlatti, San Filippo Neri (BC94037).