Roberta Mameli, Rosa Feola, and Sophie Junker: three of the world’s most appealing sopranos have each just released a new CD of often entrancing 18^th century vocal music. And they all are visiting the NYC area in 2025.

One performed a concert just before spring arrived; one is at the Met until Saturday; and the third arrives in July to headline the crowning event of a nearby summer festival. In mid-March, Italian soprano Roberta Mameli and the French ensemble Le Concert de l’Hostel Dieu briefly visited New York City to take part in a series I had been unfamiliar with, performing at a venue I’d never been to. Bohemian Hall on East 73^rd Street hosts the imaginative Aspect Chamber Music Series in its welcoming fourth-floor auditorium. Mameli and the six-musician period-instrument group were in the midst of a surprisingly expansive North American tour to promote The Ghosts of Hamlet: Lost arias from Italian baroque operas on the Arcana label.

Mameli’s generous program was helpfully prefaced by a succinct mini-lecture by John Brewer who discussed the roots of Shakespeare’s famous play and how its early Danish source became transformed into an Italian libretto for a series of operas called Ambleto. Mameli’s CD includes arias from settings of Apostolo Zeno’s libretto by Francesco Gasparini, Domenico Scarlatti, and Giuseppe Carcani (their Amblet operas premiered between 1705 and 1742) along with a repurposed selection from Handel’s Agrippina used in a 1712 London pasticcio fashioned into yet another Ambleto. Given the obscurity of these sources, it was surprising to note that just three of the nine arias were receiving their world premiere recording.

The tall and elegant soprano has an extensive discography of rarely-performed baroque works, so her interest in these Hamlet operas should come as no surprise. And as pleasing as this new recording is, her live performance of many of the same arias at Bohemian Hall was unfailingly vivid, her darkly smoky soprano in prime estate as she seamlessly moved throughout the extended range of the arias. There were occasional ill-advised ornaments that took her very high but mostly the da capo additions were stylishly adding to the emotional and musical impact of each aria.

The arias ranged from heartfelt slow arias accompanied by just continuo to energetic allegri full of vigorous coloratura which Mameli tossed off with easy command. Although she expertly employed straight-tone when needed, she also infused her singing with tasteful vibrato when needed. The arias are not only for either Ambleto or Veremonda, his Ophelia-like paramour, but also for Gerilda, the Gertrude-figure, and Valdemaro, a character in the Gasparini without a Shakespeare parallel.

The concert added an aria from Johann Joseph Fux’s Angelica vincitrice to the Ambleto numbers, and her blissful encore—the “Lascia chi’io pianga” chestnut from Rinaldo—gave us a preview of another new recording of hers: she’s Almirena in an unusual 1731 version of that Handel classic, one in which Armida and Argante are performed by a mezzo and a countertenor rather than the usual soprano and bass.

This recording, though lovely, doesn’t capture the magic of her NYC encore.

If the concert and the Ghosts of Hamlet CD don’t reveal unfairly neglected masterpieces, they did make me curious to hear more of these Ambleti. If I had flown over to Vienna this month, I could have seen Gasparini’s in a staging at the Theater an der Wien, a production in which—with Barbara Hannigan-like flair–countertenor Raffaele Pe both sang the role of Ambleto and was the music director!

This season the Met finally let Feola out of her Gilda straight-jacket (plus her brief detour as Fedora’s Olga) to perform Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro. At the premiere, she showed herself to be a wonderful Mozartian. I’ve heard the Met’s previous three Susannas– Lucy Crowe, Ying Fang and Olga Kulchynska—and I thought Feola the best of that quartet, with Fang a close second. Feola’s quicksilver maid reminded me a good deal of Mirella Freni’s: warm and sly without any soubrette archness. Unsurprisingly, her bewitching “Deh vieni” won the evening’s biggest applause. I wonder if she’s leaving the role of Susanna for good as this fall she will appear (let’s hope) with the Washington National Opera as the Countess.

Just before her NYC engagement, Pentatone released Feola’s second solo CD, Son regina e sono amante: a collection of eight arias by Niccolo Piccinni accompanied by Cappella Neapolitana conducted by Antonio Florio.

Piccinni is best known (if known at all) for his comic opera La Cecchina ovvero La buona figliuola which, despite its notoriety, is rarely done even in Italy. Based on Samuel Richard’s novel Pamela, Buona figliuola features pleasant arias and complex ensemble finales that can be recognized as predecessors of Mozart’s.

Feola’s survey skips Buona Figliola to include several excerpts from the composer’s serious works. Like many of his fellow composers, he utilized libretti by Pietro Metastasio, so one will discover the soprano in intensely elegant arias (my CD favorites) from Artaserse, Ciro Riconosciuto, and Didone abbandonata whose aria gives the CD its title, a phrase which describes easily thousands of operatic characters.

Didone is the one Piccinni I’ve heard in person: it was performed in Paris in 2003 also conducted by Florio whose long advocacy of 18^th century Neapolitan opera has produced many valuable recordings including a number of works by Francesco Provenzale whose La Stellidaura vendicante which will be produced by the forces of the Boston Early Music Festival this fall.

Feola offers an aria from Lo stravagante in vernacular Neapolitan whose text the CD booklet includes along with its Italian translation: the differences between the two are startling. Piccinni followed many Italian composers to Paris where in the 1780s he composed a Didon and an Atys, arias from which Feola includes.

They, like all the CD’s contents, are thoroughly accomplished and sometimes rise to the inspired, but rarely do they achieve the truly memorable. Throughout Feola sings with undoubted commitment, impressive musicality and fine agility (but no trill) though the voice can sound stressed at the top. She returns to the Met next year as Violetta in La Traviata opposite debuting tenor Liparit Avetisyan and baritone Amartuvshin Enkhbat.

You won’t have to wait many months to hear the marvelous Belgian Junker who will star in the title role of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea with which the Capella Mediterranea make its eagerly-awaited US debut on July12 at the Caramoor Festival.

She, too, has a new CD collection. La Serenissima: Venetian Silhouettes was recorded three years ago with (OH!) Orkiestra led by violinist Martyna Pastuszka, but it has just been released this spring. Its contents include four arias by the expected Vivaldi as well as admirable ones by Antonio Lotti, Benedetto Marcello, Tomaso Albinoni and Giovanni Porta, as well as pairs by Antonio Caldara and Gasparini, including yet another hit from Ambleto.

I first became aware of the delicious Junker from her superb Handel recording La Francesina on which she performs arias from both operas and oratorios written for French soprano Elisabeth Duparc.

I got to hear the heavily pregnant Junker perform most of this program at the Halle Handel Festival last year and her vivaciously golden soprano was even more ravishing in person.

And this new collection provides more examples of Junker’s delight in baroque music as she effortlessly tackles yards of sixteenth notes as well as spinning out long legato lines with gorgeous élan. And her high notes are great! However, I’m disturbed by several off-putting musicological decisions. For one, the haunting slow aria from Vivaldi’s Ottone in Villa is supposed to have an echo effect with a second soprano answering the first. Instead of a voice, we get Pastuszka’s violin. When I was first listening to the CD, I didn’t notice that something was missing from an aria I know well from several complete Ottone recordings. On my second and third hearing, I realized something was off: why include an aria if you can’t do it as the composer intended?

The disk’s other faux pas is its incomplete version of the magnificently intense aria “Come mai puoi vedermi pianger” from Benedetto Marcello’s cantata Arianna abbandonata. We hear the A and B sections then only the instrumental introduction to the da capo repeat of A! I had thought this archaic practice had long ago disappeared. It is a very long aria, but don’t mutilate it simply to include yet another Vivaldi violin concerto when there are hundreds of them readily available elsewhere.

Yet, even with those caveats, La Serenissima is an adorable CD, a collection of great favorites and new discoveries sung radiantly by the irresistible Junker. While I also heartily recommend the Mameli, Feola’s earnest effort remains less essential.