With his repertoire of more than 3400 works, and having been universally admired during his lifetime and even in the following decades, why is it that Caldara is so unrepresented in recordings, performances and concerts? He is known to have made extensive forays into religious music (masses, cantatas, motets, dozens of oratorios), instrumental music (symphonies, chamber music) and lyrical music (eighty-seven operas, many madrigals), as well as some three hundred and fifty sacred cantatas. But alas, Caldara spent his entire life working for various courts: Mantua, Rome and finally Vienna... His works were played and then archived - or lost - so they circulated only very rarely, being reserved for the elite. Therefore, there is much to discover in this rich repertoire, this album helps us do exactly that, packed full of cantatas for bass and continuo voices. Most of them were written during his time at the Viennese court for Charles VI of Habsburg, the Emperor of the Romans (in other words, the Holy Roman Emperor in Germany) who loved bass voices above all. It was on this occasion that Caldara wrote some twenty-four cantatas for bass, a rarity in Baroque song literature. The topics covered range from the vaguely historical Brutus (not Caesar's adopted son, but a distant ancestor, son-in-law of the legendary King Tarquin) in Bruto a'Romani to the pastoral work of A destar l'alba col canto, as well as the Hellenistic mythology Polifemo and Il Sansone. The composer seeks to describe the protagonists’ feelings, mistakes and impulses in an outpouring of exquisite melodic and harmonic imagination. Baritone Sergio Foresti is accompanied by Stile Galante’s musicians and led by Stefano Aresi. © SM/Qobuz