It is never pleasant to arrive late to a recording, especially when the passing of time only amplifies its significance. Yet listening to Prima d’esservi infedele by Valeria La Grotta with the Quartetto Vanvitelli is not merely an act of recovery; it is a gesture of reconciliation with what Baroque music can still say to us today — in terms of poetic intelligence and human depth.

The album’s title — taken from one of four Alessandro Scarlatti cantatas recorded here for the first time in modern history — already carries within it a promise of intimacy and confession. That promise is not only kept, but exceeded. What we have here is not a mere philological enterprise, but a true rebirth of sound: cantatas originally conceived for refined private settings come alive again as miniature inner tragedies, microcosms of passion and decorum, of restraint and abandon.

Valeria La Grotta confirms herself as an interpreter of rare balance between theatrical instinct and stylistic discipline. Her voice, never ostentatious, traces Scarlatti’s melodic lines with a clarity that is at once thought and breath. There is something immediately believable in her tone — a phrasing that embraces silence as eloquently as it shapes sound. She does not seek outward seduction; her appeal belongs to her by natural grace, not by design.

Her messa di voce sculpts the poetic word, brings it to the center of the musical discourse, and turns it into a dramatic gesture. From the very first recitative, the listener senses an uncommon sincerity — one that can come only from those who know music from within, not as a repertoire, but as a language.

And if the voice shines with awareness and restraint, the Quartetto Vanvitelli stands beside it with exemplary chamber intelligence. They do not accompany: they converse, sigh, comment. The texture of the two violins intertwines with the voice like a seventeenth-century conversation, one in which every phrase implies an unspoken etiquette of feeling. The continuo, supple and transparent, restores to Scarlatti the nobility of his harmonic invention without ever weighing down its lightness.

It is impossible to listen to this album without recalling the figure of Angela Voglia, known as La Giorgina, muse and ideal interpreter of Scarlatti’s Roman repertoire. It was she, in the late seventeenth century, who embodied that fascinating duality of decorum and sensuality that Scarlatti’s music understands so well. La Grotta does not offer a historical imitation but a transfiguration: she gives La Giorgina not only her voice, but a body of memory — a modern sensibility. It is as if the singer and the scholar have merged into a single interpretive gesture, where historical curiosity feeds emotion, and emotion in turn nourishes knowledge.

The beauty of Prima d’esservi infedele lies precisely here: in its ability to reconcile scholarly precision with expressive urgency. La Grotta and the Vanvitelli do not illustrate Scarlatti; they inhabit him. Each recitative is a small workshop of rhetoric, each aria a fragment of musical psychology ante litteram. And when sorrow turns into suspension, or jealousy into a broken line, one realizes that the Baroque is not a dead language at all, but a prism that reflects, with surgical precision, the eternal passions of the human soul.