Vivaldi's Venetian contemporary, Antonio Caldara, divided his working life between Italy and Austria where for the last 20 years of his life—he died in 1736—he was Vice-Kapellmeister to the Hapsburg court in Vienna. This is the second disc of his secular cantatas to have come my way recently, the other being an excellent recital by the French countertenor, Gerard Lesne on the Virgin Classics label ((CD) VC7 91479-2, 11/91). Caldara wrote cantatas at various points in his career and they represent a sizeable part of his output. The present disc, in the words of Brian Pritchard, the author of a helpful accompanying note, ''provide a chronological bird's eye view'' with works belonging both to Caldara's period in Italy and to the years in Vienna. In addition, the cantatas are interspersed with six of ten so-called continuo madrigals with a sacred bias which the composer wrote in the space of five weeks between November 1731 and January 1732.
The Wren Baroque Soloists were new to my ears, though individual members of the group may be familiar to readers in other ensemble contexts. For the most part I enjoyed their singing above all, perhaps, for the successful way in which they preserve textural clarity in the madrigals whose part-writing maintains a fairly consistently high level of interest. Among the most striking of the cantatas here is Il Dario in which King Darius III (bass) moums the death of his beloved. The intensity of Caldara's writing in this work recalls his earlier Medea, which is included on the Virgin disc. The bass Martin Elliott manages a demanding part pretty well though some of the subtler intervals are not quite sharply enough defined and there is a hollowness of sound which some may argue heightens the King's desolate predicament but which I found lacking in declamatory nuance. The sopranos Lesley-Jane Rogers and Nicola Jenkin each are allotted a cantata, the latter sounding marginally the less confident of the two, at least at the outset. These are fresh-sounding performances free from self-conscious mannerism and evocative of the Arcadian idyll The remaining cantatas are sung by Frances Jel lard (alto) and Simon Davies (tenor). Both voices make considerable appeal though Davies is occasionally insecure; but it is the tenor cantata Il Gelsomino (''The Jasmine''), with its imagery and dual similes in the second aria which makes the stronger impression: ''Could the moth ceaselessly circling the flame … be more delightfully rendered …?'' asks Pritchard in his note. Answer, yes—by Handel in his cantata Tra le fiamme. But be that as it may, this is an attractive if not entirely successful disc. Readers will find much to enjoy in it, especially perhaps the madrigals which are very well worth becoming acquainted with. Full texts are included but recording sound, though clear, is too spacious and reverberant for the modest scale of the music. An interesting issue.'