Metastasio’s libretto for Didone abbandonata was set to music by some fifty composers, among which Domenico Sarro was the first in 1724, soon, followed by Nicola Porpora the following year, the present Leonardo Vinci in 1726, Baldassare Galuppi and Johann Hasse a dozen years later, later by Niccolò Jommelli, Giuseppe Sarti, Niccolò Piccinni and as far as Saverio Mercadante in 1820. The opera was also one of the greatest successes in Leonardo Vinci’s rather brief career, a musician whose adventurous life we still know very little about except that, aged 40, he seems to have been poisoned by a jealous husband. Written for Rome’s Teatro delle Dame, the opera was premiered during the 1726 Carnival season. It was the first collaboration between Vinci and Metastasio, a highly successful teamwork destined to produce abundant fruits – in the four following years Metastasio, until Vinci’s untimely death, would write as many as five new librettos for the flirtatious composer. The present album, recorded live in January 2017 at the Teatro di Firenze, marks the first modern-day performance of Didone abbandonata, finally reviving one of the great masterpieces of early 18th-century opera. This is a highly welcome addition to the operatic repertoire.