"Earthly Delights for Angelic Voices" is the promise of the latest recording from the Boston Early Music Festival, and the performers alone suggest that the title was chosen for good reason. Amanda Forsythe, recently honored with a Grammy for her performance in Telemann's Ino, joins fellow singers Dorothee Mields (soprano) and Cecilia Duarte in bringing back to life a legendary trio that, almost exactly four hundred years ago in the Eternal City of Rome, filled the city's most distinguished connoisseurs with heavenly

delight: Le Canterine Romane-Andreana, Leonora, and Caterina Basile, the celebrated "Roman Singers."

It was for these three that the creme de la creme of composers-including Luigi Rossi, Domenico Mazzocchi, and Marco Marazzoli-wrote their music, and anyone fortunate enough to hear Mother Basile and her two daughters perform together never forgot the experience. "This concert filled me with such rapture that I forgot my mortal frame and imagined myself among the angels," wrote a French visitor in 1639. One wonders whether he wouldn't have liked to take a recording of the occasion home with him?