Entitled ‘Missa per San Marco, 1766’, this is a disc of Venetian musical life from nearly 200 years after Andrea Gabrieli became maestro di capella of St Mark’s in the golden age often regarded as the last hurrah for La Serenissima. If Venice hung on musically for a good deal of the 17th century, the names of Baldassare Galuppi, and his apprentice Ferdinando Giuseppe Bertoni, are not readily associated with the city’s brightest mosaics. Both figures occupied the same post as the Gabrielis, their work fluently composed within that decidedly galant aesthetic largely recognisable, by 1766 (the speculative date for Galuppi’s Mass), as the federal mid-18th-century norm in Europe. Don’t expect genuine ‘cori spezzati’ here, yet the rather pedantic note points out (without telling us anything much about the music) that there are some notable performing implications in the layout of musicians in the famous basilica.

The disc begins promisingly with Galuppi’s irradiating melodic inflection and confidence in the Concerto a Quattro but the Mass movements revert to stock formulae from, in all truth, a fairly second-rate imagination. While Galuppi was the toast of the town (and of St Petersburg where he became First Master and Director of all music for Her Imperial Majesty the Empress of all Russia), these works appear bland and perfunctory at a fundamental level. There’s great attention in the ‘Laudamus te’ given to soubrette- like vocal gymnastics but elsewhere there’s rarely a sense of a creative personality to be reckoned with beyond that of the assured craftsman.

The performances under Filippo Maria Bresson are spirited but without the character or refinement of, say, Rinaldo Alessandrini and Concerto Italiano in similar repertoire. The strings sound intermittently rough and the solo voices never entirely comfortable, especially the men. There are some attractive moments in the Bertoni Kyrie but I cannot, overall, recommend the recording to anyone but die-hard Venetianists.