Paolo Antonio Rolli (Rome, 1687 – Todi, 1765) belongs to that generation of Italian intellectuals whom the early eighteenth century scattered across Europe like seeds carried by the wind. A pupil of Gian Vincenzo Gravina — the very same master who shaped Metastasio — he was admitted to the Accademia dell’Arcadia under the name Eulibio Brentiatico, and carried throughout his entire output that classical imprint, that devotion to Horace and Catullus, that pursuit of a simplicity which is not poverty but the refined conquest of the natural. In 1715 he arrived in London in the retinue of the Earl of Pembroke and remained there for twenty-nine years. He became tutor to the children of George II, Italian Secretary to the Royal Academy of Music — the institution founded to bring Italian opera to the English court —, reluctant librettist to Händel, Bononcini, and Porpora. Händel did not like him, and made this clear with his customary ruthlessness. Rolli returned the antipathy with equal punctuality. But in London Rolli was not merely the hired librettist who complained about his trade: he was a cultural ambassador of rare intelligence, a man who translated Milton into Italian and defended Dante against Voltaire, who edited Ariosto and Guarini for a northern European public hungry for things Italian.

It is in this context — London 1727, the year in which the Royal Academy was drifting towards its collapse and Händel was composing Riccardo I — that Rolli published Di canzonette e di cantate, libri due, dedicated to Mary Howe, Countess of Pembroke, and printed by Tommaso Edlin. The collection is not a product of the librettistic work Rolli claimed to detest: it is the place where the poet returns to himself. Twenty-four canzonettas in the first book, twenty-four cantatas and a duet in the second — and, in some copies, an appendix with musical notation for the canzonettas alone, for female voice and basso continuo. The question of musical authorship has long been debated: who composed the melodies? Aresi, in the essay accompanying the disc, resolves the problem with philological elegance, noting that Rolli places in the collection, between the title page and the dedication, a single line from Virgil’s Eclogues — Carmina descripsi et modulans alterna notavi — which serves as an implicit claim of authorship over both texts and music together: these verses I carved, and set to music, marking word and melody in turn. And yet the collection is not, and cannot be, purely autograph: musicological research has identified significant borrowings from Händel — the final movement of the Flute Sonata HWV 365 resurfaces in Canzonetta vii, an aria from Ottone in Canzonetta XVIII — and the celebrated loure Aimable vainqueur by Campra in Canzonetta XXIV, which closes the disc like a bow to the European music he loved and frequented. Rolli thus emerges as the author-compiler of a varied and self-aware anthology, in which his own music and that of others are chosen for their affective affinity with the text, not for convenience.

The canzonetta — a brief form, agile in its metre, with heptasyllables and octosyllables that yield naturally to song — was the genre in which his most authentic vein expressed itself free of the theatre’s constraints. Not the grand affects of opera seria, not the recitatives Händel deemed involuted: here poetry becomes light, sensual, pastoral in the best sense of the word. The texts explore love and wine, shepherds and nymphs, the sorrows of the sprezzato and the joys of the spensierato, all concealed beneath Arcadian pseudonyms — Fille, Dorilla, Silvio — which may hide real people from Rolli’s London circle, or may simply be conventions of the genre. The metrical variety is deliberate and striking: octosyllables, heptasyllables, hendecasyllables, double pentasyllables, hexasyllables, each chosen for the affective character of the piece. The aesthetic governing the whole is what Carlo Caruso, the foremost Rolli scholar, has defined with an unsurpassable formula: an aesthetic of the how, not the what. Art understood as supreme mastery of the instrument, as a social and performative activity directed at the listener, judged by the impact it produces. What may appear today as a limitation — the absence of psychological depth, the polished surface — was at the time a fully legitimate ideal: the perfection of form as a form of respect for the recipient. Rolli does not write for eternity. He writes for that evening, for that drawing room, for those London ladies who carry his verses written on their fans. And then, naturally, the song slips out of his hands, and Goethe learns it as a child, and it reaches us.

Stefano Aresi knows this aesthetic from within — not as a historian observing it, but as a musician who practises it. Founder of Stile Galante, scholar of the chamber cantata, co-author with Giulia Giovani of a foundational study on galant music between 1720 and 1760, Aresi has built over the years an interpretive approach that makes the centrality of the poetic text the generative principle of every executive choice. Galant music, he has written, does not resolve itself in virtuosity — which is only one of the instruments, and not always the primary one — but in the elegance of phrasing, in stylistic coherence, in the calibrated relationship between voice and accompaniment, in attention to those minimal details that make the difference between a correct execution and a necessary one. It is this conviction — aesthetic before it is methodological — that holds Canzonette 1727 together as a unified project, beyond the variety of voices and characters that animate it.

The disc was recorded in January 2025 at the Sala Piatti in Bergamo — a choice that is not a neutral detail: an intimate space, acoustically alive without excess, suited to a music that tolerates neither emptiness nor artificial amplification. The recording, mixing and mastering are the work of Andrea Friggi, who at the harpsichord is also the other half of the continuo alongside Agnieszka Oszańca on cello. This double role — technician and performer — is not a productive accident but a guarantee of coherence: whoever has lived the music from inside the sound knows where to place the microphone. The result is a transparency that allows the listener to perceive the finest thread between voice and instrument, the breathing of the basso continuo, the micro-agogic movements that are the group’s stylistic signature.

Twenty-four pieces — ranging from under a minute to nearly six — form a sequence that seeks not dramatic tension but something more subtle: affective microcosms, neither opera arias nor cantatas with their tormented development, but agile fragments that demand an ear ready for immediacy. The disc does not construct a narrative arc; it offers a continuum of instants, each complete in itself, all partaking of a recognisable atmosphere. The metrical variety of the texts finds its counterpart in the variety of affects: one moves from the amorous lament of Canzonetta viii (Affannoso mio pensier, the longest piece and the most inwardly dense) to the good-natured irony of Canzonetta xv (Due grand’uomini già furo, which is, as Aresi notes in the booklet, essentially a joke about wine and Noah), from the explicit sensuality of the final canzonetta to the festive Bacchism of the pieces dedicated to Dori. When the writing expands — in Affannoso mio pensier, in Della noiosa Estate with its Dionysian cortege of satyrs and nymphs, in the very Solitario bosco ombroso that moved Goethe as a child — the vocal line expands and the continuo becomes dialogic, without ever betraying that lightness of touch that is the group’s signature. In the shorter pieces, by contrast, Aresi and his ensemble seem almost to challenge time: how does one say everything in under two minutes? The answer lies in the quality of intention, not in the quantity of gesture.

The seven voices that alternate throughout the programme are not a matter of productive convenience: they answer to the very nature of the canzonetta, a genre that lives on timbral variety, on affects that shift colour from one piece to the next, on that mobility which Rolli knew how to build into his verses with the same naturalness with which an elegant conversationalist moves from wit to sentiment. Each voice brings a different way of inhabiting the word — and in the whole one never senses redundancy, only richness.

Ann Hallenberg needs no introduction: her presence is that of a fixed point, an implicit measure against which the other voices define themselves. Entrusted to her voice the opening canzonetta (Venni, Amore, nel tuo regno) and the closing one (Deh placati, Amor), Hallenberg traces an arc that encompasses the entire disc — from the naïve trepidation of the first encounter with Love to the final surrender, lucid and without regret. Her phrasing carries within it that luminous gravity already memorable in the Tragedie Cristiane — authority and intimacy together, a timbre that can express composure and abandonment without ever yielding to rhetoric.

Francesca Cassinari offers a clarity of emission that suits perfectly the moments of greatest lightness in the programme. Entrusted to her Canzonetta XX (Con dolce forza), with its descriptive sensuality and ironic catalogue of feminine beauty, and the extended Se tu m’ami, se sospiri — a very celebrated text, here approached with a lucidity that avoids every conventional languor. Her clear, vibrant voice inhabits the canzonettas as if she had always known them, with a freshness that is never superficiality but affective precision.

Marina de Liso brings a softness of phrasing that holds the more lyrical passages suspended in the right time. Her interpretation of Beviam, o Dori, godiam — the great hymn to wine and youth, with its images of Champagne and Pulciano and rubies in crystal — has that rare quality of one who does not illustrate a text but inhabits it, finding in Rolli’s Bacchism not the pretext for a brilliant effect but the genuine delight of someone who knows that the day will soon return and soon depart. Her voice does not insist; it suggests — and in this repertoire, where every excess is a betrayal, suggestion is worth more than emphasis.

Giuseppina Bridelli, already memorable in the Tragedie Cristiane for her ability to transform recitative into an act of thought, confirms herself as an interpreter who contemplates the music before inhabiting it. In the shorter, more pointed canzonettas — Si ride Amore, Soli cagion crudele, No, mia bella, il sol diletto — her voice of warm but never opulent velvet restores to the brevity of the form an inward density unusual for the genre. Bridelli does not perform the affect: she meditates it, and in the listener produces that subtle unease which is the mark of great interpreters.

Chiara Brunello is the voice that surprises most, in the best sense. Entrusted to her the largest share of the programme — seven canzonettas, among them the most demanding — her contralto shapes the word with an almost artisanal attentiveness. In Affannoso mio pensier, the longest and most intimately tormented piece, Brunello constructs the enamoured poet’s lament with a narrative patience that transforms the verses into psychology: every phrase is a step toward the abyss, yet the voice never precipitates, maintaining that composure which is the truest form of despair. Her vocal line does not flow; it is built — and in the architecture of these miniatures that care becomes structure itself.

Valeria La Grotta — an interpreter who knows how to unite knowledge and feeling with rare naturalness, as she has already demonstrated in her Scarlatti — brings to this context the same disciplined and luminous measure. Entrusted to her the perhaps most subtly humorous canzonetta in the collection, Due grand’uomini già furo, where the poet pretends to debate whether Noah or Moses was the greater man, only to conclude with Olympian seriousness that the palm belongs to Noah — because he invented wine. La Grotta handles Rolli’s irony with that lightness which is the most difficult form of critical intelligence: she does not exaggerate, does not comment, lets the text speak, and laughs only with her eyes.

The revelation, in the listening, is Anastasia Terranova. Brilliant is the right word — not in the sense of a glittering surface, but of a light that comes from within: a phrasing that knows exactly where to rest, where to yield and where to hold. Entrusted to her the very brief La bionda Eurilla (forty-three seconds, three stanzas, a complete world) and the more extended Lo splendor del primo sguardo, with its almost Petrarchan catalogue of the beloved’s eyes — eyes that are kings of that realm, that gaze at themselves complacently in mirrors, that look askance half-open and half-closed. Terranova possesses that rare quality by which the brevity of a canzonetta sounds not as a limitation but as a deliberate choice, like a haiku that has no wish to be a novel.