Giovanni Battista Pergolesi owes much of his fame to La Serva Padrona, a comic intermezzo designed to be performed between the acts of an opera seria. In it, a maid and a servant conspire to convince their master to marry the maid. When Aldo Tarabella was asked to direct a performance of Pergolesi’s intermezzo, he wanted to do more than simply pair it with one of the operas it traditionally sits alongside – so he composed Il Servo Padrone, a companion piece, and a kind of sequel, to Pergolesi’s original.

At the level of the plot, things come full circle, and by the end, master and servants have returned to where things began, highlighting the difficulty of fundamentally changing social conditions. A kind of emancipation seemed within reach, but is ultimately not achieved – in some senses, the reverse of what one might expect given the transformation of social roles in Europe among (at least middle-class) women in the 17th century and since.

Musically, however, this homage to an 18th-century musical form is very much brought into the present day. Its arias are developed in an atonal context and its recitatives leave traditional Classical form behind to travel symbolically towards the light-hearted episodes found in 20th-century musical comedy. This unique album is the first ever recording of Tarabella’s tributary composition.