Two new voices join Fabio Bonizzoni's project of recording the entirety of the cantatas with instrumental accompaniment which Handel composed when in Italy: sopranos Nuria Rial and Maria Grazia Schiavo enter the compan of Roberta Invernizzi, Emanuela Galli, Raffaella Milanesi and Salvo Vitale, the singers who we have been able to hear in the first three volumes of the collection. In this fourth instalment (out of a total of seven CDs planned for release up to the end of 2009), we rediscover the patronage of the Marquis Francesco Maria Ruspoli, which lay behind the important cantata a due entitled Aminta e Fillide; this was a work which was to provide the composer with a veritable seam of musical material for use, as "borrowings", in his operas Agrippina and Rinaldo - one of the reasons perhaps why this cantata has been rarely performed and even less recorded.
Both Aminta e Fillide and the extensive cantata for soprano, Clori, mia bella Clori, which rounds off this new disc, had their origins in the special environment of the Accademia degli Arcadi, that literary society founded by a group of aristocrats, cardinals, poets, thinkers and composers in 1690, which used to hold its meetings in idyllic spots around Rome. Karl Böhmer's informed notes contained in the CD booklet suggest a number of stimulating points of view about the meaning and significance of these works for the Arcadians.