We went last night to hear Jakub Józef Orliński sing at the Wigmore Hall, which he did divinely, singing arias from forgotten Italian operas of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries by Cavalli, who studied under Monteverdi and became organist of St. Mark’s, Boretti, Bononcini, born in Modena, studied in Bologna, moved to Rome, moved to Vienna, Berlin and London, where, in the 1730s, he was a rival of Handel, Predieri, who likewise moved from Bologna to Vienna to be Kapellmeister, Hasse, who was born in Hamburg, but worked in Naples, Venice and Dresden, and Francesco Conti. Music of the courts, as Evelyn described it ‘the most magnificent & expensfull diversion’.