One of the causes of the ‘crisis’ in the music industry is the fact that too many works are recorded over and over again. There are innumerable CDs with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons or Pergolesi’s Stabat mater. But once in a while someone has the imagination to perform and record a completely unknown piece by a composer hardly anybody has ever heard about. Antonio Florio is one of those creative minds who concentrates on little-known repertoire. In the last decade or so he has explored the musical past of his city, Naples. This time he presents a composition by an Italian who, for the largest part of his life, worked in Vienna. Badia was born in Verona and went to Innsbruck at a young age.

The priest Giuseppe Cavallo was Maestro di Canto of the Conservatorio de Santa Maria de Loreto from 1672 until his death in 1684. Otherwise, virtually nothing is known about the composer, and it is only due to the musical archive of the Oratorio di Napoli, a treasure trove of rare scores, that a handful of Cavallo's works survive, including Il Giudizio Universale. This sacred oratorio presents Christ and Saint Michael, a pair of angels, two mortals, and four souls–two damned, two blessed–and begins with Christ commanding the angels to bring on the Last Judgment. What follows is a finely crafted musical drama, except for the confusion caused when the otherwise immaculately presented album fails to reveal which of the seven singers (two sopranos, three tenors, and one bass) is singing which parts.

Opus 111 continues its collection of Treasures of Naples and this time offers us a series of Neapolitan songs performed by Patrizia Bovi, Pino de Vittorio, Rosario Totaro and some instrumental soloists from the groups Micrologus and Cappella de »Turchini. The performances, always within the rigor that characterizes these ensembles, are full of freshness and liveliness. The singers articulate the texts, witty, sparkling at times, melancholic at other times, with total clarity. The instrumental works, including a version of the beautiful and anonymous "Villanella ch" all "acqua vai", are masterfully performed.