Roman Valék and the musicians of Czech Ensemble Baroque continue to prove themselves staunch advocates for the music of František Ignác Antonín Tůma. Earlier this year they explored a group of motets with star countertenor Andreas Scholl (Aparté, 2/24) and now they return to the Supraphon label for the latest in a series of recordings of choral and instrumental music, focusing this time on a setting of the Vespers, along with a Litany and a Stabat mater.

All of these works are thought to date from the 1750s, a period during which Tůma lived in Vienna as a freelance composer, having been granted a pension and a grace-and-favour apartment at the Imperial court in reward for his decade’s service as Kapellmeister to the dowager empress Elisabeth Christine (widow of Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI). The musical language, though, remains of a time past: Tůma was one of the most assiduous followers of his teacher, Johann Joseph Fux, and counterpoint is never far away, even as his music gradually adopts the manners of the emerging galant style.

The three choral works pass as a sequence alternating choral with solo or ensemble moments. Movements are short: only a couple are more than three minutes long. The Vespers and Litany are gilded with a quartet of trumpets, while the Stabat mater occupies an awed, sombre array of chromatically inflected minor tonalities. A sensitivity to orchestral colour is evident: plangent cornetts are featured in the ‘Beatus vir’ of the Vespers, trombones in the ‘Laudate Dominum’, while the Stabat’s ‘Fac me tecum’ is treated to a mournful duet between trombone and cello.

In all of this the Czech Ensemble Baroque put barely a foot wrong. The resonant acoustic seems appropriate to this style of church music but allows the timpani to boom disconcertingly. The soloists all step out from the choir and acquit themselves admirably. A theorbo gives added depth to the continuo and is a welcome presence in the instrumental works that punctuate the programme, based on French and Italian models. A fascinating voyage of discovery into Viennese church music traditions in the years before Haydn and Mozart.