Night, in these pages, is not merely a poetic setting. It is a suspension of rules. It is the moment in which the characters stop performing the role imposed upon them by the world and begin to speak with a sincerity daylight would not allow. The three works chosen for the programme — Notte ch’in carro d’ombre, Silenzio aure volanti, and All’hor che stanco il sole — do not merely share an imagery; they construct a genuine phenomenology of the Baroque night. There is night invoked as refuge, night traversed as an interior state, night experienced as a desire for dissolution and quiet.

Many composers of the late seventeenth century employ nocturnal imagery. But in Scarlatti what strikes the listener is the consistency with which night becomes associated with complex and ambivalent psychological states. It is not merely refuge; it is also danger. Darkness protects, yet amplifies obsessions and melancholies. Desired quiet constantly transforms into restlessness. In this sense, night assumes an almost philosophical function: it represents not simply the absence of light, but the temporary abolition of the conventions regulating social life. It allows the characters to listen to themselves.

Francesca Aspromonte described these figures as beings «wrapped in the dark mantle of Night... wandering restlessly while recounting the despair of their unrequited loves. Between whispers and cries, they invoke now rest, now eternal sleep, in an attempt to forget the loss of their own Sun». It is a precise formulation, and the recording takes it extremely seriously. Everything here is constructed in order to preserve that tension between intimacy and drama that lies at the heart of the Italian chamber cantata between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The programme also follows an extraordinarily careful narrative logic. Notte ch’in carro d’ombre opens the journey like a ritual invocation: night is called forth, almost summoned. Silenzio aure volanti suspends time within a contemplative and rarefied dimension, while All’hor che stanco il sole — presented here in its first complete recording — takes on the character of a slow extinguishing of the diurnal world. The succession of works is not arbitrary: it feels conceived as a psychological itinerary. One does not simply listen to three serenatas; one traverses a single mental landscape.

This matters because the chamber cantata, especially in Scarlatti, is a genre sustained by emotional concentration. Born for aristocratic and private settings, far removed from the spectacular demands of public theatre, the cantata allows the composer to work with infinitely subtler psychological nuances. The characters do not need to sustain a complex stage action: they must exist inwardly. They must think, remember, suffer, wait.

The Scarlattian cantata thus becomes a sort of theatre of consciousness. The true interlocutors are rarely only absent or lost lovers, but time, memory, the desire for quiet, even the exhaustion of existing itself. By reducing the instrumental forces and compressing the action, Scarlatti achieves an astonishing psychological precision. Every harmonic modulation seems to register a variation in the inner state. Every rhythmic suspension coincides with an uncertainty of thought. Even the recitativo secco, which in lesser hands can be reduced to a merely functional connective device, acquires here a continuous dramatic tension. The music follows the rhythm of thought with an almost obsessive lucidity.

The number of chamber cantatas attributed to Scarlatti oscillates around six hundred works, perhaps more. No other Italian composer of his time approached the genre with such continuity and with such consistently high quality. Yet quantitative data alone cannot explain the greatness of the phenomenon. What truly impresses is the way Scarlatti transforms the cantata into a miniaturized dramatic laboratory. His music does not proceed merely through codified affects; it constantly seeks transitions, ambiguities, progressive transformations of emotion.

It is here that Scarlatti’s music reveals a surprising modernity. His output is traditionally associated with the stabilization of the Italian overture in three movements — fast, slow, fast — destined to exert broad European influence. Even in his four-part instrumental writing one may observe elements anticipating the future logic of the string quartet. Even the handling of motivic material appears, in certain cases, more dynamic and integrated than that of many contemporaries.

Naturally, celebratory simplifications must be avoided. Scarlatti did not single-handedly “invent” the European eighteenth century. But reducing him to the textbook formula of “father of the Neapolitan school” means ignoring the real extent of his influence. Georg Frideric Händel, during his Italian sojourn, encountered that musical world directly and absorbed its language deeply. This is not a matter of establishing mechanical relations of dependence, but of recognizing that Scarlatti represented one of the most advanced centres of Italian musical culture of his age.

The recording by Aspromonte and Arsenale Sonoro seems constructed precisely from this awareness. Here Scarlatti is not treated as an author to be restored with museum-like reverence, but as a composer still capable of speaking directly to the contemporary listener. The difference is decisive. Too much modern Baroque performance continues to oscillate between two equally sterile extremes: ornamental virtuosity that turns everything into glittering surface, and sonic archaeology that sacrifices musical life to stylistic correctness.

Aspromonte avoids both risks with rare intelligence. Her voice possesses body, density, and a perfectly sustained line, yet there is never the sensation of display. Every choice appears subordinated to the necessity of the text. Words are not decorated: they are thought. This is probably the most difficult quality to achieve in the Baroque repertory, because it requires absolute technical control and, at the same time, the ability to render that control invisible.

Cyril Mazin, awarding her the Diamant d’Opéra, spoke of the «precision of her accents» and the «naturalness of her delivery». These are exact observations. Aspromonte constructs the musical phrase with an almost architectural lucidity, yet constantly avoids any rigidity. Her half-voices do not seek timbral self-indulgence; they serve to modulate the character’s thought.

Aspromonte furthermore approaches recitative with a controlled freedom that avoids both declamatory emphasis and academic neutrality. Every word retains specific weight. Every pause seems born of an inner necessity of the phrase. It is a type of interpretation requiring not only vocal technique, but literary intelligence as well.

The quality of the ensemble is equally decisive. Boris Begelman conducts and plays the violin with an exceptionally clear conception of the dramatic function of instrumental sound. Arsenale Sonoro does not merely accompany the voice: it dialogues with it. Rossella Croce on violin, Maria Cristina Vasi on viola, Alessandro Palmeri on cello, Giangiacomo Pinardi on lute, and Federica Bianchi on harpsichord construct a sonic fabric in which every intervention possesses narrative weight.

This is an important point, because much Baroque music on record suffers from a problem of sonic hierarchy: the voice emerges while the ensemble becomes an indistinct background. Here the opposite occurs. The centrality of the voice is preserved without the instruments losing identity. Every line continues to breathe autonomously. This creates an extraordinarily vivid, almost theatrical listening experience.

The two four-part sonatas inserted into the programme fulfill, in this sense, an essential function. They are not interludes intended to lighten the listening experience between one cantata and another. Rather, they function as emotional resonance chambers. After the voice, the discourse continues within the instruments; night proceeds in abstract form.

The recording itself also contributes decisively to the result. The Sala Ghislieri in Mondovì offers an acoustic spacious enough to allow the music to breathe, yet not so reverberant as to compromise textual intelligibility. In repertory of this kind, clarity of the word is fundamental. Scarlatti’s cantatas do not live by melody alone: they live through the constant relationship between music and poetic rhetoric.

The relationship between word and music is, moreover, one of the central points of Scarlatti’s entire poetics. Scarlatti still belongs fully to the rhetorical civilization of the Baroque, yet often surpasses its more conventional limits. Codified affects are not simply illustrated; they are developed through time. Arias do not interrupt dramatic discourse: they deepen it. Even in moments of apparent contemplative immobility, the music continues to think.

It is here that the initial connection with Wagner ceases to be a mere literary suggestion and acquires a deeper structural meaning. Naturally, the world of Tristan belongs to another harmonic, theatrical, and philosophical conception. Yet the idea that night might become a space of inner truth traverses the entire history of European opera.

The Baroque night is not yet the Romantic night of the absolute and of metaphysical annihilation. It is a night inhabited by melancholy, desire, and the weariness of living. The characters in these serenatas do not seek cosmic dissolution; they seek, rather, a truce. They wish to be heard by someone who does not judge. Night thus becomes the only possible interlocutor.

There is also something profoundly Italian in the way Scarlatti constructs the relationship between pain and measure. Even in moments of greatest emotional tension, form never collapses. Suffering does not destroy the balance of musical discourse; it renders that balance more necessary. In Scarlatti, control does not repress emotion: it allows emotion to become intelligible.

This quality emerges with particular clarity precisely in Aspromonte’s interpretation. Her singing does not constantly seek sonic expansion; it seeks the precision of the musical word. In an age in which much vocality tends to identify intensity with excess, this choice produces a surprisingly modern effect. The vulnerability of the characters is never over-theatricalized. It remains human, close, credible.

The Diapason d’or and the Diamant d’Opéra awarded to the recording therefore end up seeming almost inevitable. Not so much as media consecrations, but as recognitions of a quality that has become rare: the ability to unite philological rigor and expressive necessity without sacrificing either dimension.

There is also another element worth recalling, because it indirectly illuminates the work carried out here by Aspromonte. In 2025 the soprano performed the Stimme des Waldvogels in Wagner’s Siegfried at Teatro alla Scala, in the production directed by David McVicar with Klaus Florian Vogt and Camilla Nylund. It is a brief role, but musically revealing. The Waldvogel represents one of the very rare moments in which Wagner asks the voice for absolute lightness, transparency, and suspended singing. In other words: he asks for bel canto qualities.

The first Brünnhilde at Bayreuth, Amalie Materna, came from a still fully nineteenth-century vocal school founded upon legato and control of vocal emission. She herself insisted that Wagner could not be sung without a solid bel canto foundation. The radical separation between bel canto culture and the Wagnerian universe is largely a later construction.

What remains, then, is the decisive question: why listen to Alessandro Scarlatti today? Why return to a repertory that, outside specialist circles and for a large part of contemporary listening culture, still occupies a sort of periphery within musical history? The answer this recording suggests is simple: because within these cantatas there exists a humanity that remains perfectly recognizable.

The figures created by Scarlatti live within a poetic grammar distant from our own, yet their emotions preserve a startling lucidity. They speak of the weariness of waiting, the desire for silence, the fear of abandonment, the desperate search for some form of peace. Above all, they speak of the necessity of a space in which one may finally stop pretending.

Night thus becomes not merely a literary symbol, but a moral and psychological system. It is the place where the hierarchies of daylight are suspended. The place where vulnerability no longer appears as guilt. The place where speech may slow down and become listening.

Aspromonte and Arsenale Sonoro inhabit this world with rare seriousness. They seek neither effects nor forced actualizations; they do not attempt to transform Scarlatti into something he is not. They take him seriously. And it is precisely this seriousness that allows the music to become startlingly present.

When the recording ends, what remains is a sensation difficult to describe precisely: not that of having witnessed a display of virtuosity, but of having traversed a coherent, inhabitable, human mental space. Scarlatti’s night is not a decorative backdrop. It is a form of consciousness. And this recording succeeds in rendering it visible once again.