‘The Great Venetian Mass’ may look at first like a good old-fashioned liturgical reconstruction of the sort we associate with Andrew Parrott or Paul McCreesh, but quickly reveals itself more as a way of putting some Vivaldi choral pieces together to make a larger whole. Vivaldi’s contract at the Ospedale della Pietà did require him to write Masses, and while there is no surviving complete setting by him, there are a stand-alone Kyrie, two Glorias and two Credos (one dubious), plus an eyewitness account of an (unknown) Agnus Dei performed at a Sunday Mass. Paul Agnew has duly supplied this, as well as a Sanctus and Benedictus, by adapting to these texts existing music from the composer’s Magnificat, RV610, Dixit Dominus, RV807, and Beatus vir, RV597. But he admits to making ‘no great claims for the authenticity’ of the project, based as it is on ‘the flimsiest of evidence’.

That’s quite all right, of course. This is a pleasingly coherent programme of Vivaldi sacred music that happily places his most popular choral work among pieces we don’t hear so often, including a plangent, imposing Kyrie and a Credo that contrasts febrile, shivering strings with a haltingly tender central ‘Crucifixus’. The ‘new’ numbers give us a Sanctus that reaches down joyfully from on high, a warmly expressive slow Benedictus for alto and muted strings and a sober Agnus Dei that borrows convincingly from the Kyrie. Ostro picta, armata spina, a motet designed to function as an introduction to the Gloria, provides some welcome solo vocal display.

Which leads us to the performances – Les Arts Florissants’ first foray into Vivaldi, I think. Agnew brings the same strengths to bear as William Christie has down the years, which is to say a sturdy but pliant choral tone and an attention to text that constantly informs the shape and direction of the music. It could be easy to make Vivaldi sound bland, almost uncaring, but every choral phrase or orchestral ritornello here is granted space and time to register the little ebbs and flows, dynamic nuances and other less easily defined rhetorical lifts that make the music live. Sophie Karthäuser is bright and sunny in Ostro picta (though the weighty pauses on ‘Let tongues be still’ may irritate on repetition), and the increasingly in-demand Lucile Richardot is darkly intense in the ‘Domine Deus, Agnus Dei’ and Benedictus. This is richly enjoyable Vivaldi throughout, and for the Gloria may even be a top choice.