The Scarlatti family was a major force in early-18th-century Italian music, led by Alessandro Scarlatti, who composed more than 100 operas and his son Domenico, who produced more than 500 keyboard sonatas. Alongside their prodigious achievements, the relatively modest output of Alessandro’s brother Francesco, who spent his working life as a choir master first in Sicily and Naples and later in London and Dublin, has been quite overshadowed.
The singers and instrumentalists of Christopher Monks’s Armonico Consort have been doing their best to rehabilitate Francesco’s music with their Forgotten Scarlatti project. In 2022, they marked the group’s 20th anniversary by performing and recording two of his choral works, and they have now resuscitated Francesco’s only surviving oratorio, Il Daniele nel Lago de’ Leoni (Daniel in the Lions’ Den), which was probably first performed in Palermo in the first decade of the 18th century. The manuscript came to light in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
The text is taken from the book of Daniel, and as well as portraying the story of Daniel in the lion’s den, it also adds the encounter between Bel and a fire-breathing dragon. The five solo singers take all the roles, with Daniel and the Angel allotted to sopranos, and the soloists also join forces to form the chorus. The Armonico performance certainly underlines the dramatic and pictorial aspects of Scarlatti’s score, and even if the solo voices seem a little uneven at times, it’s a more than worthwhile rehabilitation.
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