Not all of Vivaldi’s sacred music was composed for the Ospedale della Pieta, the Venetian girls’ orphanage which employed him intermittently for most of his life. This latest release (Vol. 5) in Robert King’s complete cycle of Vivaldi’s church music mainly features works unconnected with the Pieta, including a motet written in Rome and the famous Stabat mater composed for a church in Brescia. All are for solo voice or voices and orchestra, and for the most part they carry the typical Vivaldi trademarks: boisterous energy alongside a tender if angular lyricism; a vivid and excitable responsiveness to verbal imagery; and what Michael Talbot describes convincingly in his notes as ‘a shocking radicalism: a willingness to strip music down to its core and reconstitute it from these simplest elements.’
The best works on this disc are the first three. In turbato mare is a rip-roaring ‘simile’ motet which makes use of the old operatic device of comparing a troubled soul to a storm-tossed ship finding peace in port. The noble Non in pratis aut in hortis is an introduzione, a short motet designed to precede a performance of a lost Miserere; since it ends on a half-close, it is followed here (with musical if not liturgical logic) by the Stabat mater All are excellently sung; few recordings exist of the first two, but it is hard to imagine the ebulliently virtuosic Susan Gritton and the movingly firm-voiced Jean Rigby being significantly bettered. By contrast, the Stabat mater is well-trodden territory, not least by Andreas Scholl, in a Gramophone Award-winning recital, but the warmly mellifluous Robin Blaze easily confirms his reputation as Britain’s most promising countertenor. The King’s Consort is a little raw in the string department, but in general it shows bright and lively form and is well served by an acoustic perfectly suited to the occasion. Under King’s direction, too, they capture splendidly the spirit of this uncomplicated but atmospheric music.'