Rosalind Halton

Biography

Rosalind Halton is a harpsichordist and music researcher who was based first at the University of New England and from 1999 at the University of Newcastle. In both roles she has promoted undergraduate and postgraduate study integrating performance and research. A graduate of Otago and Oxford Universities, she has devoted her work since the 1980s to researching cantatas of the Italian baroque composer Alessandro Scarlatti and his contemporaries. Her recordings include a 3 CD set of newly edited works, Serenatas and Cantatas of Alessandro Scarlatti (ABC Classics, 2007), and solo CDs of French harpsichord music, her other main interest.

Active as editor and performer, Rosalind has produced editions of many previously unpublished works of Scarlatti for A-R Editions (U.S.A), WLSCM (the Web Library of Seventeenth Century Music), and Saraband Music (Australia). She has been a regular contributor to music conferences mainly in Italy, Australia, and New Zealand, leading to international musicological publications on many facets of Alessandro Scarlatti’s instrumental and vocal music.

More recently her focus has broadened to take in manuscript sources of Scarlatti’s contemporaries, including a study of seven composers through settings of a single text in Transitions in Mid-Baroque Music (Boydell Press, 2024); and of Giovanni Bononcini in I Bononcini da Modena all’Europa (1666-1747) (Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2020). She collaborated with the author Luca della Libera in preparing the English translation of The Roman Sacred Music of Alessandro Scarlatti (Routledge 2022). Current work includes editing secular vocal music of Giacomo Carissimi and Alessandro Stradella, Scarlatti’s two most influential predecessors of the previous generation, for Saraband Music.