Rediscovered last year, Vivaldi’s Dixit Dominus is the most substantial of several sacred works copied for the Catholic court at Dresden that were deliberately misattributed to Baldassarre Galuppi. The perpetrators of the crime were probably Vivaldi’s unscrupulous nephews, who furnished the Dresden court with ‘new’ Italian church music at some point during the 1750s or ’60s.

The world premiere recording reveals that the consistent high quality of the score is infused with a variety of moods and textures: Sara Mingardo’s ravishing soft solos in ‘Donec ponam’ are boldly punctuated by choral interjections that are unmistakably Vivaldian in their vivid character; Roberta Invernizzi’s vivacious ‘Virgam virtutis tuae’ is sung with meticulously controlled gusto; Paul Agnew’s muscular low tenor passagework in ‘Dominus a dextris tuis’ is illuminated by superbly mingled attack and refinement from the Dresden Instrumental-Concert’s gut strings. Körnerscher Sing-Verein has exemplary choral balance, possessing homogenous beauty but with warmly rounded counterpoint.

Three genuine Galuppi psalm-settings offer an opportunity to contrast his civilised galant style with the bold, intensely coloured rhetoric of Vivaldi’s rediscovered masterpiece: one wonders how anybody was fooled by the misattribution. Peter Kopp has made a handful of magnificent recordings for CPO and Carus, so it is good to witness his finely crafted debut on DG Archiv presenting what may be justifiably described as the finest non-operatic Vivaldi discovery of the past 75 years.