CPO's latest CD featuring the Capella Orlandi brings together stage music by Gottfried Finger and John Eccles, who wrote songs for the famous English stage actress Anne Bracegirdle. At the end of the seventeenth century England's theatrical world was shaped by the defensive stance of traditionalists toward influences from the Italian opera and the magnificence radiating from the French court. The English counterproposal, the 'English opera', was a combination of 'heroic plays' with musical inserts ranging from individual songs, as were performed during Shakespeare's time, to 'all-sung masques', miniature operas with pastoral content. The Mad Lover is a good example of the English opera. On this recording song inserts from other masques are added to this comedy by John Fletcher from 1647. Anne Bracegirdle was so very successful with compositions by John Eccles that she later exclusively sang works by him.

Reinhard Keiser’s Kleine theatralische Musik contains arrangements of instrumental versions of opera numbers composed for Hamburg and performed there. With the greatest probability this work involves a collection of »theater music« compiled by the composer from his operas written prior to 1718. This work is complemented by further instrumental music as well as cantatas and arias by Keiser. The program covers a spectrum including Keiser’s initial years in Hamburg, the period of his greatest success in the second decade of the eighteenth century, and his difficult traveling years following 1719.