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.
