Volume 6 of Robert King’s most welcome complete cycle of Vivaldi’s sacred music brings a mixture of functional bits and pieces – two brief choral settings of the psalms Laudate Dominum and In exitu Israel, whizzing by in a flurry of homophonic word-expenditure and busily attentive string-writing – and some longer pieces which seem at times to be made up of bits and pieces themselves. The larger-scale Beatus vir is a late version of the better-known RV597, to which a few new, galant-style replacement solo movements have been added; Salve Regina is a touchingly gentle hymn to the Virgin for soprano, solo violin and strings, ending with a beautiful Siciliano; and Nisi Dominus is another substantial psalm- setting, this time for solo contralto and strings, encompassing in its nine movements an almost wanton variety of styles.
All are performed with straightforward brightness and style by King and his team. Once again they are in a perfect acoustic, and with choir and orchestra giving clear and accurate performances and King showing a sure touch in his choices of tempo and mood, there is little that can go wrong. As usual, however, it is in his canny choice of vocal soloists that King scores most highly. Susan Gritton exudes a calm but firm piety in Salve Regina. The sound of three contraltos singing together in Beatus vir is a strange and wonderful one, yet even more so when one of them, Hilary Summers, emerges into the limelight later in the work with a timbre that can only be described as tenor-like – a rare glimpse, perhaps, of the sound world at Vivaldi’s Pieta, where one Ambrosina was famed for her low voice.
In Nathalie Stutzmann, however, soloist for Nisi Dominus, King has picked one of the baroque voices of the moment; strong and even throughout its range, secure and unruffled in fast passagework but also capable of spellbinding stillness and beauty in more static music such as the drowsily operatic (not to mention Orient-tinged) ‘Cum dederit’, or the curiously meditative ‘Gloria patri’ with its haunting viola d’amore solo. In what, in its expressive and technical range, amounts almost to a demonstration piece for baroque altos, Stutzmann’s is a model performance.'