Il Canto Della Sirena : Cantate Napoletane Dell’età Barocca (2011)

‘The Song of the Siren’ runs the rubric, though the voices in this three-disc set of Neapolitan Baroque songs and cantatas are more likely to be bitchy, sardonic or plain raunchy. Even the normally ultra-refined Alessandro Scarlatti has fun setting a salty text in Neapolitan dialect, slyly pointing the humour with the odd juicy dissonance. Tenor Pino De Vittorio has two of the discs virtually to himself and his raw, pungent timbre, easy agility and wry way with the vernacular texts make him the perfect advocate of these post-watershed tales of lust, infidelity and erotic frenzy. Where needed, too, he can tone down the folk-style abrasiveness to reveal a light, ductile ‘Baroque’ tenor. His declamation and comic timing are an object lesson, not least in a sequence of increasingly delirious mini-cantatas by Simone Coya chronicling the travails of ‘the crazed lover’. (...)