The title, deliberately broad, evokes a historical season in which the voice — female, or entrusted to the great castrati — stood at the centre of a complex symbolic geography: theatre and church, affects and discipline, expression and architecture. The aim here is not to reconstruct an era philologically, nor to display its contrasts, but to restore to circulation a quality of singing and listening that belongs to that world and that today all too often risks being oversimplified.

The programme is built with narrative intelligence. The arias, motets and instrumental pages are not arranged as isolated numbers, but as stages of a journey that alternates tension and release, clarity and warmth, without ever breaking the thread. A disc that invites one to breathe.

The opening entrusted to Antonio Vivaldi has the task of immediately defining the terrain. Armatae face et anguibus, Vagaus’s aria from Juditha triumphans, is a page of character that over time has known sharply polarised readings. Gabetta imparts a drive that at certain moments constrains the breath of the phrase, but Viotti holds the line with firmness, and the martial profile of the piece finds its coherence nonetheless. There is no pursuit of immediate effect; rather, a tension that unfolds without forcing, allowing the writing to take its course.

This approach runs through the entire Vivaldian block. In the motets (Ascende laeta, Canta in prato, ride in monte), the vocal writing becomes more open, more luminous, yet never loses its sobriety. Cantability emerges as a structural element, not as an occasion for display. Even in the more festive passages, the expression remains consistently legible, embedded in a broader design that privileges the continuity of the musical discourse.

If Vivaldi represents the side of formal clarity and well-tempered tension, Nicola Porpora offers the lyrical heart of the disc. The Salve Regina in F major — composed in 1730 for the Venetian contralto known as La Zabetta, whose timbre and agility were already legendary among her contemporaries — unfolds as a long cantabile arc, in which the voice is called not so much to astonish as to sustain. Here Marina Viotti displays a full confidence with a writing that lives on breath, on support, on the balance between word and sound. The singing proceeds naturally, allowing the music to unfold without urgency, sustained by an accompaniment that listens and accompanies in turn.

Porpora, master of singing and architect of eighteenth-century vocality, emerges in his full stature not as an emblem of virtuosity, but as a composer of a cantability that is considered, constructed, and deeply aware of the expressive means of the voice. Listening to these pages restores a sober devotional dimension, far removed from both pathos and abstraction.

The instrumental pages inserted in the programme do not interrupt the flow, but expand it. Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto RV 387, dedicated to Anna Maria della Pietà, is not a mere interlude: it is an open window onto the sonic context in which these voices took shape. The concertante writing enters into ideal dialogue with the singing, recalling that in the eighteenth century the distinction between vocal and instrumental was often more porous than we are accustomed to think today.

The final section dedicated to Giovanni Porta completes the journey with a different character. A less frequently performed composer but one perfectly embedded in his time, Porta offers in Volate gentes a relaxed, open writing in which tension gives way to a sense of serene expansion — not stasis, but resolution. Here the voice is free to move with greater ease, while remaining faithful to the general orientation of the disc. The concluding Alleluia does not seek a final peroration, but presents itself as the natural resolution of the discourse, leaving the listener with a sense of achieved equilibrium.

Decisive throughout the disc is the work of the Orchestre de l’Opéra Royal under the direction of Andrés Gabetta. The sound is always legible, the articulation carefully considered, the basso continuo present without ever becoming intrusive — though at certain moments the rhythmic drive allows less space than the vocal writing would require. The orchestra does not compete with the voice, but sustains it, frames it, accompanies it as an integral part of the project. It is a musical conception that privileges the ensemble over the isolated detail, and one that finds its natural place within the productions associated with the Opéra Royal de Versailles.