The conference hall of a local bank, the Cassa Rurale Treviglio, which was a church in the nineteenth century, housed this event. It was organized with the main goal of providing a platform for younger scholars to present their research on the subject of the Italian chamber cantata in its final phase and its connection with the development of the galant style. It was planned and run by the early-music Ensemble ‘Stile Galante’ and its founder and director Stefano Aresi, with the cooperation of the Università di Pavia and the Centro di Musica Antica Pietà de’ Turchini, Naples. Aresi was assisted by a competent team of chairs, comprising Maria Teresa Gialdroni, Paologiovanni Maione, Berthold Over and Angela Romagnoli. The special nature of the conference, enjoyable though it was, had the disadvantage of a certain thematic randomness, with astonishing lacunae: ‘big names’ such as Sarro, Vinci, Pergolesi, Domenico Scarlatti and Hasse as well as the poets Rolli and Metastasio were either ignored or treated only in passing.

The first session was dedicated to source studies. In ‘Alessandro Ginelli, “copista di musica” e “povero cantore” romano del primo Settecento’ (Alessandro Ginelli, ‘Music Copyist’ and ‘Impoverished Singer’ from Early Eighteenth-Century Rome) Giacomo Sciommeri (Università di Roma Tor Vergata) shed new light on the activity of the copyist Ginelli, well known from Handelian biography. Giulia Giovani (Université de Fribourg) then discussed a little-known manuscript containing cantatas by Alessandro Scarlatti from the collection of the famous castrato Gasparo Pacchierotti (1740–1821), which is owned today by the Fondazione Cini in Venice. The shorter evening session of the first day drew attention to the genre of the Italian sacred cantata and its long-lasting performance history in cities such as Milan and Palermo (papers by Giacomo Sances (Università di Roma Tor Vergata) and Ilaria Grippaudo (Università di Roma La Sapienza)).

The next day started with a session on the pastoral tradition, a subject so important for the genre of the chamber cantata. Chiara Pelliccia (Università di Roma Tor Vergata) spoke about progressive literary circles in Florence (such as those assembled by the English ambassador Horace Mann) and how the idea of freedom was treated in their idyllic poetry, while Federico Franchin (Università di Pavia) discussed the use of dialect as a means of social characterization of ‘rural’ characters in the Neapolitan ‘commeddeja pe museca’ La Lisa pontegliosa. Stefano Aresi, in ‘Porpora and the Pastoral Tradition’, analysed selected works by Nicola Porpora with regard to their musical characterization of bucolic scenes or images.

Perhaps the most important subject of the conference was concerned with analysing stylistic and technical aspects of the galant style in Italy. In the session ‘Comporre ed eseguire musica galante’ (Composing and Performing Galant Music) two contributions – a joint presentation by Lydia Carlisi (Rome) and Paolo Sullo (Università di Roma Tor Vergata) and a paper by Marco Pollaci (University of Nottingham) – concentrated on the Italian (mainly Neapolitan) partimento tradition. In ‘Influenze delle tradizioni compositive del periodo galante sulla produzione operistica del diciannovesimo secolo’ (Influences of Galant Compositional Traditions on the Operatic Production of the Nineteenth Century) Pollaci found traces of the harmonic patterns that are typical of this school in late nineteenth-century opera scores by Cilea and Puccini. Simone Ciolfi (Università di Roma Tor Vergata), with ‘“Verosimiglianza”, “naturalezza” e “semplicità” del recitativo nelle cantate da camera d'epoca galante’ (‘Verisimilitude’, ‘Naturalness’ and ‘Simplicity’ in the Galant Chamber Cantata Recitative), discussed the aesthetic of recitative in Italian chamber cantatas. In ‘“Soll eine Melodie galant aussehen …”, ovvero stile galante e Manieren nella trattatistica vocale tedesca del secondo Settecento’ (“Should a Melody Seem Galant …”, or Galant Style and Manieren in German Vocal Treatises of the Later Eighteenth Century) Livio Marcaletti (Universität Bern) discussed aspects of the galant as treated by German theorists such as Johann Joachim Quantz and Georg Joseph Vogler, and the influence of Italian vocal style on their music, while Federico Maria Sardelli (Florence) considered the evolution of Antonio Vivaldi towards a ‘modern’ manner (‘Vivaldi galante’).

The concluding session on the next morning was dedicated to the international reception of the chamber cantata and Italian vocal music in general. Michela Berti (Rome) discussed the 1728 opera Carlo Magno by Giovanni Battista Costanzi, written in honour of the French ambassador, as a means of papal diplomacy. The two last papers of the conference centred on the charismatic personality of Maria Antonia Walpurgis of Bavaria, Electress of Saxony. Nastasja Gandolfo (Hochschule für Musik Würzburg) presented several collections of chamber cantatas by Giovanni Battista Ferrandini (1710–1791), Kapellmeister at the Munich court and former music teacher of the princess, from her private music collection in Dresden, while I (Steffen Voss, RISM-Arbeitsgruppe Deutschland, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München) discussed her Italian cantata texts and compared some of their settings by such composers as Giovanni Alberto Ristori, Giovanni Marco Rutini and Carl Heinrich Graun.