Reviewing a new recording of the Vivaldi Gloria in Gramophone in 1963, Jeremy Noble opined that it ‘does not reveal any profundities in the score, but then I don’t think there are any to reveal – stylistically the work is surely routine baroque, with little of the fire or individuality about it that we find in the best of Vivaldi’s concertos’. The piece had barely notched half a dozen recordings at the time. Performers and listeners were still getting used to it.

Noble was a distinguished scholar of Venetian music who died in 2017, and it would be interesting to know if anything ever caused him to change his view. Now with over 50 recordings to its name, the Gloria has surely become one of the most popular works of Baroque sacred music, beloved of record-buyers and choral societies alike. And while it may not have achieved the hold-music ubiquity of The Four Seasons, it has at times been a similar victim of its own success, with familiarity breeding if not exactly contempt, then at least sometimes a ‘not that again’ reaction.

No doubt its lack of textural density has not helped – how can something so stripped-down have the profundity of Bach or Handel? But that’s the way it always is with Vivaldi, isn’t it? A few notes boldly shaped by an irrepressible and unmistakable creative personality, a composer with an indefinable but vital spark who can stimulate your senses and get inside your head without you quite knowing how. ‘Fervour, exaltation, and mysticism; these qualities break forth from the scores’, the Vivaldi scholar Michael Talbot once said of Vivaldi’s 50-or-so choral psalm-settings, Mass movements and solo motets, suggesting on another occasion that they were ‘the bridge between his imagination as a musician and his conviction as a priest: the point on which all facets of his complex personality converged’. Listen to a committed performance of the Gloria’s yearning, beseeching ‘Et in terra pax’, or the noble penitence of the ‘Domine Deus, Agnus Dei’, and surely you will believe it so.

It is not ‘the Vivaldi Gloria’, of course, but one of two, both in D major and of similar design even to the point of using the same final chorus. The only way to distinguish them by name is the cumbersome one of using their Ryom catalogue numbers: ‘the Gloria’ is RV589; ‘the other Gloria’ (which has never really caught on) is RV588. Both probably date from the period from 1713 to 1719 when Vivaldi was temporarily in charge of vocal music at the Ospedale della Pietà, the Venetian foundling hospital famed internationally for its all-female choir and orchestra, that intermittently employed him as its violin teacher and maestro de’ concerti. Although its liturgical purpose is unclear (it’s not thought to have been part of a greater Mass setting), our Gloria would probably have been performed from behind the grilles of the Pietà’s chapel to an audience largely drawn there not so much by God as by the formidable reputation of this outstanding ensemble.

The Gloria is in 12 sections, beginning with what has become one of the most familiar passages of Baroque sacred music: stamping orchestral octaves and ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo’ joyfully declaimed by the choir. This is followed by the gently throbbing, teased-out consonances and dissonances of the ‘Et in terra pax’, and then nine more delightfully contrasted movements. The solos include the light-footed ‘Laudamus te’ for two sopranos, the sweetly swaying duet for soprano and oboe (or violin if wished) at ‘Domine Deus, Rex coelestis’, the moving ‘Domine Deus, Agnus Dei’ for alto soloist with solo cello and softly sympathising background choir, and an upbeat, leaping alto aria for ‘Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris’. The choruses range from short homophonic linking sections (‘Gratias agimus tibi’ and ‘Qui tollis peccata mundi’) via the earnestly imitative declarations of ‘Propter magnam, gloriam tuam’ to a joyous dotted-note contrapuntal dance with passacaglia-like descending bass line (‘Domine Fili unigenite’). At the end, a cleverly filleted reprise of the opening music at ‘Quoniam tu solus sanctus’ leads to a more substantial fugue for ‘Cum Sancto Spiritu’. Vivaldi, who was never entirely at home at the stricter end of fugal composition, was happy on this occasion to rework (and improve) a movement from a Gloria by his fellow Venetian, Giovanni Maria Ruggieri.

Finding a sound

After Vivaldi’s death in 1741 almost all his music disappeared from view, remaining virtually unknown right into the 1920s and ’30s, when interest in performing a composer with evident influence on Bach’s concerto-writing began to stir. In 1939 an influential week-long Vivaldi festival, headed by the composer Alfredo Casella and presented at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, revived a number of the composer’s long-forgotten vocal works, of which the Gloria, with its compact and richly varied movements, deft thematic interconnections and bright overall personality, was the main beneficiary. The first recording of the piece seems to have been one conducted by Arrigo Pedrollo in 1949, and others followed in the ’50s and early ’60s by the likes of André Jouve, Marcel Couraud, Bruno Bartoletti, Hermann Scherchen and Vittorio Negri. The lasting impressions of what I have been able to hear of them (the Jouve and Negri can be found on YouTube) are of Casella’s evidently dodgy edition (now no longer in use) and poor sound quality. ‘Some recent recordings … have been making me wonder if the work is overrated’, sighed Stanley Sadie in Gramophone. Oh dear!

Fortunately, Sadie’s words of complaint were the opening ones of an enthusiastic welcome for a new recording from David Willcocks and the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, who sing with a clarity, balance and discipline to match the clean lines of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. This may be the first recording to present the piece in the way we are used to hearing it today. ‘Et in terra pax’ is beautifully hushed and intimate, almost fearful, while the shorter declamatory choruses are impressive. Soprano Elizabeth Vaughan’s fierce vibrato almost blows away Roger Lord’s sweetly flowering oboe solo in ‘Domine Deus, Rex coelestis’ and makes an uneasy partner for Janet Baker in ‘Laudamus te’, though Baker then gives a predictably moving ‘Domine Deus, Agnus Dei’, even if her ‘Qui sedes’ is a tad over-serious. The music-making in this performance can be a trifle inflexible, but this is nevertheless easy to imagine as a go‑to Gloria for its time.

A decent challenger, perhaps especially in Europe, may well have been Michel Corboz’s 1974 recording with Lausanne forces, part of a complete cycle of Vivaldi’s sacred music for Erato. Corboz had a gift for creating an ethereal, cloistery choral sound, and we find it here in the distant beauty of a glacially slow ‘Et in terra pax’. There is an appealing stillness, too, in Jennifer Smith’s ‘Domine Deus, Rex coelestis’. But lovely as these moments are, and for all that this performance is smooth, polished and thoughtful, it lacks cohesion; Corboz’s tender touch hinders forward momentum, most unsettlingly in a dawdling ‘Domine Deus, Agnus Dei’.

Comparing the brightly crisp Willcocks and more cushioned Corboz, one senses that this was still a time with room for a variety of approaches to the Gloria, that the piece was still undergoing exploration. In 1977 it was the turn of Riccardo Muti. The New Philharmonia Chorus are unwieldy, of course, and lack both core and colour, but the New Philharmonia Orchestra are right up for it, their gleaming strings rather stealing the show in ‘Domine Fili unigenite’. Unsurprisingly, soloists Teresa Berganza and Lucia Valentini Terrassi deploy more vibrato than strictly necessary, but Terrassi’s ‘Domine Deus, Agnus Dei’ is moving and reflective, its mood carrying over into a rapt ‘Qui tollis’.

The following year saw Vittorio Negri return to the Gloria, this time with the John Alldis Choir and the English Chamber Orchestra in a reading that could hardly be more different from his first (which had been a live one wafting indistinctly among the mosaics of the Basilica San Marco in Venice – 1/66). This time the playing and singing are firm, alert and accomplished (the solidly luminous professional choir especially), and the recording is brightly transparent. The solos, too, are delightful, none more so than Margaret Marshall’s ravishing ‘Domine Deus, Rex coelestis’, shadowed by a loving and sensitive violin obbligato from José Luis Garcia. There are times when the choral intensity could have been dialled down just a notch, but in general Negri conducts with a keen ear for detail and a convincing feel for the music.

Negri’s recording was part of a second complete Vivaldi church music cycle, this time for Philips, and a healthy sign that for the Gloria things were looking up. The 1978 tercentenary also gave Vivaldi’s music a shot in the arm. The age of period instruments, too, was almost upon us, but the moderns were not quite done yet.

In 1982 the Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge, under George Guest, produced a rather stately account, the choir singing with long, open vowels in the ‘Gloria‑h’, bringing granitic weight to the ‘Et in terrra pax’ and conjuring an impressive ending to the work. The broad bowing of the Wren Orchestra sounds old-fashioned for the 1980s, but has tremendous poise and is always clear-cut and pleasing to the ear. And as late as 1990 Neville Marriner entered the field with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields orchestra and choir. Expertly sung and played, it includes a beautifully long-drawn ‘Et in terra pax’, but elsewhere some of the interpretative details try too hard, while the choral sound is in-your-face, almost uncomfortable. Likewise Barbara Hendricks’s overbearing, vibrato‑laden ‘Domine Deus’.

Expansion period

After recordings of the Gloria in 1977 by Hanns-Martin Schneidt’s Regensburg Cathedral Choir (5/78) and Jean-Claude Malgoire’s La Grande Écurie et la Chambre du Roy (10/77) had tested the period-instrument waters without really escaping their drawbacks, a major breakthrough came the following year when Simon Preston and his Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, joined forces with Britain’s ‘authentic’ orchestra of the moment, the Academy of Ancient Music. Their string-playing sounds a little raw by today’s standards, but the transformation they bring in the music’s atmosphere is remarkable – in clarity and definition, of course, but also in the balance of scale and intensity. Neither hectic nor religiose, here for the first time the music really seems comfortable in its skin, able to make its points and maintain energy without forcing things, and every bit as much of a revelation as the famous Messiah these same forces were soon to bring us. The soloists (a young Emma Kirkby among them) are perfect fits, as are the tastefully imaginative ornamentations of oboist Clare Shanks and cellist Anthony Pleeth.

Simon Preston’s 1978 recording remains a benchmark

Trevor Pinnock and The English Concert made the first of their two recordings of the Gloria in 1987, a performance that benefits both from the improved quality of period playing (in which The English Concert were at the forefront) and of Pinnock’s own naturally elegant musicianship. His professional choir ease feelingly through the ‘Et in terra pax’ without overdoing things, there is an exquisite lilt to the ‘Domine Deus, Rex coelistis’ from soprano Nancy Argenta and oboist Paul Goodwin, and a strikingly slow ‘Qui tollis’ chorus whose pensive melancholy Catherine Denley’s ‘Qui sedes’ does not attempt to dispel. Pinnock’s second recording was made live in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome in 1992, the main difference from the first lying in stronger tempo contrasts, for instance in a strikingly energetic ‘Propter magnam gloriam’ and more languid ‘Domine Deus, Rex coelestis’. The larger building, warmly resonant but distancing for the choir, may be why Pinnock seems to be working harder on articulation and emphasis, at the cost of the earlier version’s pleasing subtleties.

Gloria recordings were beginning to proliferate, as more professional chamber choirs and period orchestras appeared on the scene, particularly in England, and with them perhaps came a certain stylistic orthodoxy of clean and light textures, brisk tempos and slick singing and playing. Richard Hickox and Collegium 90 (7/91), Harry Christophers and The Sixteen (12/92) and Stephen Cleobury with King’s College and the AAM (7/02) were all responsible for perfectly good Glorias, with Christophers perhaps pipping the others for shine.

It hardly needs saying that when Nikolaus Harnoncourt made his play in 1991, it was with something decidedly more adventurous. In a typically bald acoustic the Vienna Concentus Musicus and the Arnold Schoenberg Choir punch big in a phantasmagoria of brusque declamations, shock accents, surprise slurrings and jabbing staccatos. It can be hard to live with – the fidgety attention-seeking organ continuo in ‘Domine Deus, Rex coelestis’ and lumpy cello in ‘Domine Deus, Agnus Dei’ certainly are – but Harnoncourt never fails to give you something worthwhile to think about; why not, indeed, emphasise the ‘Sanct-’, rather than the ‘-tus’, of ‘Quoniam tu solus sanctus’? Whatever the validity of these oddities, though, the lasting impression here is of unremitting seriousness.

Rinaldo Alessandrini’s 1997 recording with Concerto Italiano was even more revisionist. Many, I’m sure, will think the headlong opening chorus, broken-up lines, choppy continuo and fussy phrasing must be intended as a joke, as also the massive messa di voce that opens the quasi-operatic scena of Sara Mingardo’s ‘Domine Deus, Agnus Dei’, or the explosive tempo gear-shift in ‘Qui tollis’. The recorded sound is unfriendly, too, and I think listeners unappreciative of Alessandrini’s ‘barmy hedonism’ (as Gramophone’s David Vickers expressed it) may not last the course. That, however, is not the end of this particular story …

John Eliot Gardiner combines local details with longer-range tension

If something that brought together British clarity and sheen with continental imagination and daring was what was needed, then John Eliot Gardiner was the right man in the right place in his 1998 recording with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists. The very opening – seemingly such a simple movement to throw off – reveals how Gardiner can combine local details of declamation and dynamic with the longer-range tension of the music; when we arrive at the dominant-seventh chord that climaxes the orchestral play-in, it feels as if the music could snap. In a tour de force of proactive choral conducting, Gardiner never forgets the meaning of the words: the ‘Et in terra pax’ is restless, always rolling in one direction or another; the choir dies away at the end of ‘Domine Fili unigenite’ to be gently gathered up by the strings; and there is an almost desperate acceleration of urgency at ‘suscipe deprecationem nostram’ (‘receive our prayer’) in the ‘Qui tollis’. The soloists are not starry ones, though Katharine Fuge provides a winningly innocent ‘Domine Deus, Agnus Dei’. The choir and orchestra are as good as you’ll get.

In 1994 Hyperion began a third Vivaldi sacred music cycle with Robert King and The King’s Consort that from the start looked capable of achieving reference status. The Gloria was saved for the final release in 2004, and was worth the wait. King’s naturally unfussy approach can work well for Vivaldi, his choir and orchestra sound bright and lusty (if not quite as tonally finessed as can be found elsewhere), and he picked promising young soloists in Carolyn Sampson, Joanne Lunn and Joyce DiDonato. Sampson’s ‘Domine Deus, Rex coelestis’ with oboist Alexandra Bellamy is as gorgeous and precise as can be, and DiDonato is firmly secure while refreshingly free of the matronly air of some other mezzos.

Elephant in the Room

You may have noticed that so far something has been missing from this history of recorded Glorias. Wasn’t that a mention of an all-female ensemble back at the beginning? Ah yes. This is the conundrum most performers have sidestepped down the decades: that at the Ospedale della Pietà Vivaldi directed a choir and orchestra entirely, famously, made up of girls and women, yet wrote out the choral parts in the conventional set-up of soprano, alto, tenor and bass. So what can his performances have sounded like? Suggestions have been made that he co-opted male singers, but a mixed ensemble simply would not have been deemed appropriate in church. More plausible is that the tenor line was sung either an octave up or at pitch (perfectly achievable – I myself sing in a choir in which all the tenors are female), and the bass line by a group of especially deep-voiced women (the Pietà records listed at one time a certain ‘Anneta dal basso’) with the occasional difficult low note put up an octave. By writing his music out in the normal manner, Vivaldi was perhaps leaving open the possibility of performance by a mixed choir – the way most modern performers have been pleased to accept it.

It was not until 1992 that an attempt was made to recreate the Pietà sound on record, by Andrew Parrott and his Taverner Choir and Players. Naturally the performance posits a new way of thinking of the piece from the moment of the choir’s first entry, cool but evocative enough to make the hair on your neck stand up. Hearing the tenor line pop up over the soprano line can be a little disorientating if you’re familiar with the ‘normal’ version, but in most other respects this a conventional (and successful) reading. There is perhaps a deliberate lessening of driven intensity and a little more give-and-take in the string-playing, but in the larger picture the performance feels somewhat detached.

Two more attempts followed in the 2000s: Edward Higginbottom joined up with the Nidaros Cathedral Girls’ Choir and the Norwegian Baroque Orchestra for a performance whose youthful tone (the choir sound not at all unlike Higginbottom’s own New College Choir) is upliftingly suggestive of a Vivaldi ‘youth choir’. The orchestral playing is not the silkiest and tempos are definitely on the safe side, yet the solos are touchingly innocent and there is a thrilling appearance of what seems to be a female bass in the solo-quartet rendering of ‘Propter magnam gloriam tuam’. Mathias Maute and Ensemble Caprice take a different approach, the smallish ensemble finding room for a rich dialogue of interpretative detail and nuance, its agile command of phrasing, dynamics and articulation making it as constantly active an interpretation as any. A jewel in its own right, in fact.

Hervé Niquet and Le Concert Spirituel’s 2015 recording is evocative and celebratory

The act of reimagining the Gloria in its all-female context reaches its apogee of extravagance in the 2015 recording by Hervé Niquet and Le Concert Sprituel. Like Harnoncourt, Niquet can be guaranteed to do almost everything differently from everyone else. Here he has all the solos sung by full sections (and hey, Vivaldi never marked them as solos in the score, so why not?). It works surprisingly well in the soprano solos, not so much in the alto ones. Dropping the trumpet and oboe – which definitely are in the score – is harder to understand; perhaps Niquet thought their harder edge would damage the special ambience of this performance, which, eccentric as it is, does more with its generous phrasing, reverberant embrace and communal warmth than any other to conjure in my mind an oral image of a performance by the talented and accomplished female musicians of a Venetian orphanage. The ‘Cum Sancto Spiritu’ finale is a bit of a scramble, mind.

And on it goes

The production rate of Glorias has slowed somewhat in the past decade and a half, but the enrichment has continued. In 2009 Rinaldo Alessandrini returned to the work and, remarkably, moderated the wilful oddness of his previous recording to good effect. Though essentially similar in its shape and effects, it is almost as if he were ‘correcting’ his former over-eagerness. Sara Mingardo is still in there stretching the ‘Domine Deus, Agnus Dei’ to the limit, but it makes more sense now, fitting into a more naturally coherent concept of the work as a whole. The sound is also better, and the choral singing lighter, more transparent, less intransigent – more like the work of the skilled madrigal conductor we know Alessandrini to be.

Diego Fasolis is another lively mind guaranteed to avoid complacency, and his 2015 recording with the choir of Radio Svizzera and I Barocchisti is full of energy, bright ideas and flexible phrasing. Not all details will appeal – for instance the poked ‘mi‑se‑re‑re’s and the a cappella held ‘nnn’ on the final Amen (an ending that’ll have you cowering behind the sofa once you know it’s coming) – but as ever with this conductor the overall effect is of a refreshing and uplifting one‑off.

The most recent Gloria comes from Les Arts Florissants, recorded during Covid under Paul Agnew. Typically of LAF, this is a performance in which text is paramount, informing the shaping, the intensity, the comings and the goings of choir and instruments, and never retreating into blandness. In short it is always human, always saying something; the rise and fall of the ‘Et in terra pax’ reminds me of the sleeping man depicted in the fantasmi section of Vivaldi’s La notte Concerto; the end of ‘Domine Fili unigenite’ drifts away on the charged Venetian air; ‘Qui tollis’ builds a rapid head of steam from a standing start. Perhaps Vivaldi’s Gloria is not a masterpiece, but in a performance like this it is a living and breathing statement – very far from the routine.

The finest Gloria

Monteverdi Choir; English Baroque Soloists / John Eliot Gardiner

Philips/Decca 462 597-2PH

Two recordings impressed in excelsis for their combination of astute musical detail and a sense that these familiar liturgical words might actually mean something. Paul Agnew’s has everything you would expect from the Les Arts Florissants tradition, but it is John Eliot Gardiner whose reading – brilliantly conceived at every turn and carried off by his choir and orchestra with thrilling expressive virtuosity – captivates that little bit more.

On period instruments

Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford; AAM / Simon Preston

L’Oiseau-Lyre 443 178-2OM

Not quite the first period-instrument attempt, but surely the first to count (and much reissued since its appearance nearly 50 years ago), Simon Preston’s recording with the AAM and the boys and men of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, brought fresh air, a new and convincing sense of style and above all a relaxed joy to the work.

On Modern instruments

John Alldis Choir; ECO / Vittorio Negri

Philips 420 648-2PH

Oh go on then, if you must. David Willcocks brings the elegance of the English choral tradition to the work, while a guiltier pleasure would be Riccardo Muti’s grand-scale splash. But Vittorio Negri’s high-class 1978 recording has energy, taste and polish, as well as the ECO and the John Alldis Choir on excellent form, and a radiant Margaret Marshall.

All-female choirs

Le Concert Spirituel / Hervé Niquet

Alpha ALPHA222

There’s no real need for a separate category for the four recordings that reflect Vivaldi’s original performing conditions (and in any case each has its own distinctive approach), but for a ‘best’, Hervé Niquet’s evocative reimagination – generous, enthusiastic and celebratory – carries the most allure.

Selected Discography

Recording Date / Artists / Record company (review date)

1966 Choir of King’s College, Cambridge; ASMF / David Willcocks Decca 425 724-2DM (1/67)

1974 Ensemble Vocal & Instrumental de Lausanne / Michel Corboz Apex 0927 48681-2 (5/76, 5/86)

1977 New Philh Orch & Chorus / Riccardo Muti Warner Classics 085223-2 (12/77)

1978 John Alldis Choir; ECO / Vittorio Negri Philips 420 648-2PH (3/79, 5/88)

1978 Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford; AAM / Simon Preston L’Oiseau-Lyre 443 178-2OM (1/79, 1/86)

1982 Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge; Wren Orch / George Guest Decca 443 455-2DF2 (12/82, 8/83)

1987 English Concert & Choir / Trevor Pinnock Archiv 423 386-2AH (5/88)

1990 ASMF & Choir / Neville Marriner Warner Classics 208125-2 (3/92)

1991 Arnold Schoenberg Choir; Concentus Musicus Wien / Nikolaus Harnoncourt Elatus 2564 60441-2 (7/94)

1992 Taverner Choir & Players / Andrew Parrott Erato 364799-2 (1/95)

1992 English Concert & Choir / Trevor Pinnock Archiv 437 834-2AH (3/94)

1997 Akadêmia; Concerto Italiano / Rinaldo Alesssandrini Naïve/Opus 111 OP30195 (6/98)

1998 Monteverdi Choir; English Baroque Soloists / John Eliot Gardiner Philips/Decca 462 597-2PH (12/01)

2003 King’s Consort & Choir / Robert King Hyperion CDA66849 (4/04)

2005 Nidaros Cathedral Girls’ Choir; Norwegian Baroque Orch / Edward Higginbottom Kirkelig FXCD295

2008 Ensemble Caprice / Matthias Maute Analekta AN2 9917

2009 Concerto Italiano / Rinaldo Alesssandrini Naïve OP30485 (2/10)

2015 Radiotelevisione Svizzera Choir; I Barocchisti / Diego Fasolis Decca 483 3874DH (5/18)

2015 Le Concert Spirituel / Hervé Niquet Alpha ALPHA222 (12/15)

2020 Les Arts Florissants / Paul Agnew Harmonia Mundi HAF890 5358 (9/22)