Try an experiment: listen to the opening bars of this disc without looking at the cover. A recitative that rends the darkness with theatrical authority, an aria of cantabile breath and immediate affect, a poetic language Arcadian through and through: anyone would place this music in the Venetian or Roman orbit of the early decades of the eighteenth century, among the epigones of Scarlatti and the fellow travellers of Vivaldi. Then, in the closing aria of the first cantata, Alle tarde età lontane, as the text entrusts to Fame a name to be spread down the centuries, two hunting horns enter — and the illusion, rather than shattering, comes into focus. No Roman salon could have afforded that timbre: horns presuppose a stable, salaried court orchestra, rich in virtuosi. They are sonic heraldry, summoned at the precise moment the poetry speaks of glory, and they declare the true location of this Arcadia: the palace on the Elbe. Johann David Heinichen, Kapellmeister in Dresden from 1717 until his death in 1729, wrote Italian music in Saxony — and this disc, the first solo album by Miriam Albano with the Academia Montis Regalis, is the most persuasive document of that double citizenship recorded to date.

History handed Heinichen down to posterity as a theorist: his treatise on basso continuo, in its monumental 1728 version, remained a point of reference for generations, while the music slid into oblivion. It is an irony this programme overturns with elegance. For the heart of that treatise is precisely the notion of good taste — the idea that contrapuntal correctness is not enough, and that music must persuade through naturalness and proportion — and the five cantatas gathered here are the sounding demonstration of that chapter. The rule-maker reveals himself a rhetorician of the affections, which is to say the exact opposite of the pedant. When Mattheson numbered Heinichen among the three great H’s of German music, alongside Handel and Hasse, he was recording a judgement of the age that the nineteenth century would later erase: the category of “minor” is a historiographical outcome, not a fact. This disc asks for no emphatic rehabilitations; it asks for a willing ear, and repays it with a finesse that grows with every hearing.

Trained at the Thomasschule in Leipzig under Kuhnau, a lawyer for some years before yielding to music for good, Heinichen undertook between 1710 and 1716 the Italian journey that changed his grammar: Venice, Florence, Rome, the encounter with the music of Vivaldi, Scarlatti, Gasparini. Of the more than sixty chamber cantatas he left us, the five chosen here — transmitted in two manuscripts that belonged to Augustus III — have a particular physiognomy: where the Italian tradition called for voice and continuo, Heinichen deploys flutes, oboes, horns, strings and lute, drawing on the resources of the most celebrated Hofkapelle in Europe. These are, in all likelihood, world premiere recordings (Seibel 168, 193, 139, 189, 174): an entire shelf of the Italian cantata outside Italy made audible once more.

The programme traces a precise path, from court to Arcadia. The first two cantatas are the ceremonial façade: encomia for the Saxon dynastic calendar. La Virtù nel giorno di Gioseffa, for Maria Josepha of Austria, is not an amorous cantata with a lyric self, but an allegorical monologue: Virtue in person, daughter of Jupiter, descends among mortals, commands the darkness to scatter, admonishes the watchful souls — the dramaturgy of an operatic prologue. Albano grasps this exactly: she does not describe an affect, she is someone. And when, in the final recitative, the allegory is torn open and the goddess points to the real woman “there on the Elbe’s right bank”, the text lets true geography burst into the fiction.

In the second aria the pizzicato violins lighten the texture to the point of transparency, an accompaniment that becomes a gesture rather than a support; and the closing recitative takes leave of the goddess with a solemnity free of emphasis.

The Cantata nel giorno di Christiano holds the opposite surprise: the text promises fireworks — jubilation, festive trumpets, resounding echoes — and the music answers with a gathered, almost meditative nobility. Heinichen treats joy as an affect to be argued, not displayed. The architecture seconds this design by reversing convention: it is the only cantata in the programme that opens with an aria — the curtain already raised on jubilation — and closes with a recitative, gathered into the final toast, the brief cavata on the hendecasyllable “Viva Christiano e la sua gloria viva”, where composure melts for a few seconds before the little instrumental cadenza. One question the disc does not address remains open: the dedicatee. Friedrich August, the future Augustus III, did not bear the name Christian; and the text speaks of tender feet guided in their first steps, of health restored, of the ancestor Wittekind. Clues that would suggest, with the prudence of the conditional, the frail crown prince Friedrich Christian, or a Christian of another Saxon branch — like that Duke of Weissenfels, the city where the young Heinichen had practised law, for whose birthday Bach too wrote celebrated pages. Philology will tell; meanwhile the ear records that this celebration sounds more tender than triumphal, and the two things may not be unrelated.

With the three amorous cantatas the disc enters the private rooms, and Heinichen changes his posture. Già la stagion novella is the most elegant and naturally singable of the programme: a pastoral in four numbers where the violins paint the spring and where, in Occhi cari, voice and strings proceed in unison as in a duet with an absent beloved — the answer the text invokes and never obtains, embodied by the instrument. Dori, vezzosa Dori inhabits the territory of sweet torment: Fileno dares not wake his beloved, asks sleep for a moment’s leave, and departs at last contented on Love’s word. Albano chooses tenderness over anguish, a reading the text authorises from its second line onwards; the timbral summit is the central aria, Dolce sonno del mio ben, a nocturne in which the voice finely underscores the atmosphere — the most intimate page of the entire disc, weighed by the performers with a delicacy that by itself justifies the recording. Lieve turba canora, finally, is Heinichen at his most serene: the homorhythmic tutti of the first aria has the gait of a gigue, the programme’s only moment of dance, while the last aria takes leave of the listener with a dialogue of paired flute and violin in which the German contrapuntist resurfaces, discreetly, on the very last page.

Of Miriam Albano it must be said without reservation: hers is the right voice for this repertoire. A well-balanced instrument, homogeneous across its whole range — that border zone between soprano and mezzo which Heinichen’s writing frequents continually — and governed by an intelligence that consistently places the text before display. Her phrasing seeks the rhetorical sense of the words, which is anything but a given; her ornaments in the da capos are pertinent, never decorative; and her ability to change weight and colour from cantata to cantata — authoritative as Virtue, composed in the encomium, smiling in Arcadia — is precisely the theatrical credibility this music demands if it is not to dwindle into a catalogue rarity. After years of an international operatic career, this solo recording debut presents her as a complete, balanced, convincing interpreter.

The Academia Montis Regalis confirms a concertation born of mutual listening: Martino Noferi and Gregorio Carraro alternate oboes and recorders with fine propriety of colour, Domenico Cerasani gives the obbligato lute of Dori a speaking presence, the horns of Dimer Maccaferri and Benedetto Dallaglio ring out without overbearing, and Diego Ares maintains from the harpsichord a continuo that is present but never intrusive, imaginative in the recitatives and sober in the arias. Realsound’s engineering, in the Sala Ghisleri in Mondovì, returns a close, warm image, suited to the intimacy of these pages.

The recording, in short, is solid and very finely produced. The most fitting farewell is offered by the last cantata of the programme, with its emblem of the caged bird that does not mourn its lost liberty, because the hand that feeds it is kind. It is hard not to read in it, against the light, a self-portrait: Heinichen lived his last twelve years in the gilded captivity of Dresden, Italian by choice, Saxon by destiny, serene by nature. From that cage he never wished to escape; from that cage, as we hear today, he never ceased to sing.