It's unlikely that the name Francesco Gasparini will mean much these days even to many Baroque music enthusiasts. He was a great composer in his day, knocking out numerous cantatas and as many as three or four well-received operas a year which heavily influenced Handel. It was he who enrolled Vivaldi as violin teacher at the Ospedale della Pietà where he was master of music, and Alessandro Scarlatti hired him as teacher to his son Domenico.This disc of nine cantatas for solo voice with basso continuo (here a solo harpsichord) could have been an excellent opportunity to hear compositions by a forgotten great, but like many of these sets on the Tractus label, the performance is not all that outstanding. Soprano Susanna Rigacci's style is a bit too vibrato heavy for my liking, but apart from that she seems to me to struggle a bit with consistency of pitch.The booklet contains some very brief notes in Italian, English & French. Libretti are given with no translation.