Despite having heard four wonderful volumes of Monteverdi’s sacred music from The King’s Consort, and its 2004 Proms performance of the 1610 Vespers, I was still unprepared for the ecstatic consequences of taking seriously at least one aspect of Monteverdi’s so-called seconda pratica – using much freer counterpoint, with an increasing hierarchy of voices: that the word is mistress of the music. And what ecstasy!

Never mind the majestic opening psalm: just listen to the eloquent gestures in the ‘Dixit Dominus’, which range from the declamatory to the reticent with astonishing flexibility. Or the freedom and delicacy of tenor James Gilchrist in the ‘Nigra sum’, equally matched by the fragile spaciousness of Caroline Sampson’s and Rebecca Outram’s ‘Pulchra es’.

Spaciousness soon loses its fragility in the propulsive ‘Nisi Dominus’ and the ‘Lauda Jerusalem’ with its luxuriant finale. And although I still prefer the ‘Sonata sopra Sancta Maria’ with a solo soprano line (as in Rinaldo Alessandrini’s recording, Naïve, 2/05), its instrumental variations are here dispatched with such fluency it’s hard not to be won over; the ‘Ave maris stella’ is similarly eloquent. The second disc includes equally superb performances of the alternative six-voice Magnificat and the Missa In illo tempore.

The cumulative effect here is of a dazzling chiaroscuro that Monteverdi surely would have recognised. In contrast, Alessandrini’s one-voice-per-part version has so much energy bursting to get out that it sounds like he’s trying to restrain a bull with gossamer – although that’s what makes it such a compelling experience. With its use of full choir, King’s recording simply has more room to manoeuvre – which gives the imagination more room to take flight.