Contrasto Armonico’s slow-burning Handel cantatas project explores often-performed Italian cantate con stromenti in context alongside neglected chamber cantatas for only solo voice accompanied by basso continuo. The third instalment since Marco Vitale set up his own independent label is the seventh volume overall (the first four volumes were issued by Brilliant Classics), and it presents six different soprano cantatas written for unknown circumstances somewhere in Italy sometime between late 1706 and 1709.

Ellen Harris’s perceptive essay suggests that Alpestre monte might have been composed in either Florence or Venice in about 1709. The inconvenient truth is that nobody really knows. Beatrice Palumbo sings with a slightly uneven flutter that nonetheless conveys an appealing emotional vulnerability and poetic sincerity, in dialogue with two violin parts shaded fluently by Enrique Gómez-Cabrero Fernández and Marzeno Biwo. Its opening accompanied recitative describing wild alpine mountains and forests mirroring an unrequited young man’s despair, the first lament containing expressive chromatic dissonances and the sorrowful closing aria conveying hopelessness amid overlapping contrapuntal violins are all interpreted with expressive sensitivity.

The other cantata here to feature a violin is Figlio d’alte speranze. Its narration of the fluctuating fortunes of King Abdolonymus of Sidon makes it the odd one out among poetry that otherwise presents outpourings of suffering lovers. It was written on Venetian paper – but that does not necessarily mean it was composed in or for Venice. We seem to be on firmer ground with Pensieri notturni di Filli, probably created in Rome in 1707 08. This is a spellbinding performance albeit with occasional vocal frailties, offering blissful pastoral conversations between Palumbo and recorder player Romeo Ciuffa.

A puzzling mystery is just how much (or little) Handel composed for Florence. Harris suggests three continuo cantatas here might have Florentine origins: Chi rapì la pace al core, Ah, che pur troppo è vero and Non sospirar, non piangere. Again, nobody knows – but these poignant and articulately shaped performances of some of Handel’s least-known works are rewarding. Palumbo’s limpid singing in the intimate small-scale music is supported elegantly by the continuo duo of cellist Marta Semkiw and Vitale, who plays the florid harpsichord obbligato part in HWV177 with judicious dexterity. The manifold qualities of these seldom-recorded continuo cantatas speak for themselves in these endearing performances.