Factoid: Maria Callas’s first professional role was the Biblical princess Salome, whose ask for a dance is no 10 cents but the head of a prophet on a silver platter. Fact: Callas sang this character not in the celebrated Richard Strauss shocker but in a 90-minute oratorio by the Bologna native Alessandro Stradella, a predecessor of Corelli, Vivaldi, and Handel whose career of embezzlement, seduction, and violence is a Netflix series waiting to happen. (There’s already an opera, but no one performs it.) Factoid: No audio of the Callas Salome exists—a pity, since her fireworks over the prophet’s head are Grucci-grade. (Salome’s subsequent duet with her unstrung stepfather closes the work on the unanswered question Why?, trailing off on an unresolved chord. Charles Ives would have loved it.) Hats off to Catapult’s founder and artistic director Neal Goren for wresting yet another collector’s item from the jaws of oblivion. Watch and listen for the top-flight countertenor Randall Scotting, who is having quite a moment. This spring, Scotting’s brawny yet golden tone and athletic presence rendered unto Caesar what is Caesar’s in a title role of Handel’s in Hudson, New York. Now, as John the Baptist, he gets to render unto God what is God’s. The exciting young soprano Raven McMillon, now perhaps safely past any need to wow competition judges (as she has done at the highest level), steps out as Salome. —Matthew Gurewitsch