La Serenissma’s latest delve into the Vivaldi archives has thrown up a programme full of unfamiliar textures, all helping to bring into new focus the composer’s work at Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà, as well as the women who performed there.

A glance down the list of instruments gives some sense of the timbral range. A chalumeau and viola d’amore as well as a violin in tromba marina all join the string orchestra and trio of solo singers. Each offers exaggeration, distortion or reframing of tone colour – something intriguingly echoed in the miniature cantata Cur sagittas (written as a prelude to a now-lost Gloria) with its strikingly low contralto solo. It’s as though an orchestral paintbox of primary colours has been replaced by a palette with infinite gradations and variations of a single shade.

The Concerto for viola d’amore, RV394, shows off the range of a specially commissioned new Italian-style instrument (six playing strings and six sympathetic strings, rather than the typical German seven/seven) from luthier Dan Larson. Chandler makes the most of its fine-spun, silvery tone in the slow movement (whose matter-of-fact phrasing balances out the moonlit glow), and there’s more filigree detail in the final movement’s cadenza. It couldn’t be further from the raspy, buzzy violin in tromba marina, all fanfares and rustic attack in the Concerto in G, RV313.

Jess Dandy is a game soloist in the wonderfully fiery Cur sagittas, luscious breadth of tone spilling over and softening some of the more awkward gear-shifts of register. She’s joined by soprano Claire Booth and mezzo Renata Pokupić for the Nisi Dominus, RV803, with its kaleidoscopic orchestral accompaniment, including a woody pairing of mezzo and chalumeau for ‘Cum dederit dilectis suis’ and the contrasting pairing of Booth’s feathery soprano detail and a warmly baritonal obbligato cello in ‘Beatus vir’.

The recording includes another curiosity in the form of the Concerto for violin, strings and continuo in F – the premiere recording of a work previously credited to Albinoni and only recently, thanks to scholarship by Michael Talbot, attributed to Vivaldi. The highlight is an attractive slow movement in which the soloist glides gondola-like on a churning lagoon of string arpeggios.

But for all its Italian focus, there’s something rather anglophone about the style of performance here. Soft edges and smooth gestures make for a lovely listen, but with so many textures available it seems oddly homogeneous, lacking the bite and grit of continental rivals.