Vivaldi’s reputation as a composer for the voice has been rising recently, which is good news considering that there is quite a lot still to discover. Robert King is one of the main proselytisers, and here he takes time off from his complete sacred music cycle to give us a taste of the world of Venetian secular celebration in the form of these two serenatas.

Serenatas were large-scale works for solo singers and orchestra, between an opera and an oratorio in style, usually commissioned by a patrician to mark a favourable political or dynastic event. As such they would have been performed once in lavish circumstances (in Venice the audience sometimes watched from gondolas) and then forgotten. Well, not quite forgotten, thankfully; three serenatas by Vivaldi survive, and the two recorded here have plenty of attractions. Indeed, since neither has anything that you might call a plot, one is free to enjoy Vivaldi’s music simply for what it is, which is to say utterly delightful.

La Senna festeggiante and Gloria e Imeneo seem to have been written for the enjoyment of the French diplomatic corps: both celebrate happy events in the life of Louis XV and have texts of suitably sickening sycophancy. In La Senna, three allegorical figures, The Golden Age, Virtue and The Seine salute Louis’s general greatness in terms that would make the most ardent royalist blush, while Gloria e Imeneo finds a similar way to celebrate the young monarch’s wedding. Of the two, it is the 80-minute La Senna which has the best music, a well-varied sequence of arias and ensembles neatly divided between a soprano, an alto and a bass, and with the characters convincingly distinguished. The bass has some particularly thrilling and wide-ranging music, and almost every number is full of irrepressible Vivaldian vitality. Gloria e Imeneo is shorter at just over an hour, and slightly less interesting too, lacking both La Senna’s variety and its level of overall excitement and inspiration. Both works employ some ‘borrowings’, by the way, and two numbers are common to both, including an irresistible alto aria which appears in La Senna as ‘Così sol nell’aurora’.

King directs strong performances of both works, with all the familiar virtues of his sacred music series in evidence, from its bright energy to its shrewdly selected soloists and perfectly judged recordings. He has a rival in La Senna in the form of an excellent recent account for Opus 111 by Rinaldo Alessandrini, who adopts a more sharply etched approach to the work and encourages greater dramatic input from his Italian singers. King’s talented young soloists are softer toned and more intimate by comparison, while still coping ably with the music’s often tricky technical demands. King also makes more of the work’s conscious ‘Frenchisms’, and composes a new section of recitative to fill a gap in the original manuscript. Both performances are admirable in fact; a choice will come down to matters of taste and the question of whether you want to pay extra for Gloria e Imeneo. Make no mistake though; if you are a Vivaldi-lover you will want La Senna festeggiante.