Peter Bassano, the prime-mover of this new record, is a direct descendent of the family of that name that provided so many musicians for the English court during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and who were in turn related to Giovanni Bassano—composer, cornett player, singer, theorist and maestro di concerto at St Mark's Venice from 1575 until his death in 1617. (Incidentally, it is another musical member of the family, Emilia Bassano, who was identified by A. L. Rowse as the Dark Lady of the Shakespeare sonnets.) It is the exciting discovery of his ancestry, made by Peter Bassano only in recent years, that explains the otherwise rather curious planning of this record, with its mixture of pieces by familiar Venetians and distinctly unfamiliar Bassanos (some of whom seem never to have set foot in Venice), all under the slightly misleading title of ''Venice Preserved''.
Jerome Bassano, for example, was baptized in England, spent time in the King's Musick, and ended up the very model of a landed gentleman; his two five-voice fantasias are thoroughly English in idiom, pleasant and undemanding to listen to but in essence performers' music. The heart of the record is not with these latter-day Bassanos, but rather with Giovanni and his Venetian contemporaries, Monteverdi and the Gabrielis. Here there are some very fine things indeed. The overall sound is rich and muscular, and speeds have for the most part been chosen with a careful eye to overall architecture. Giovanni Bassano himself is a more interesting composer than has been generally recognized, and his setting of Deus qui beatum Marcum is a masterly exercise in the Venetian antiphonal manner; its carefully-controlled and well-shaped performance here only whets one's appetite for more. Occasionally there are miscalculations; the magical opening of Giovanni Gabrieli's O magnum mysterium has more of the character of a pronouncement than of the growing sense of wonder that the music suggests, and I don't think that there is much of a musical (or indeed historical) case for all the added ornamentation in Monteverdi's Beatus vir. But at its best, as in the quite stunning performance of Giovanni Gabrieli's Omnes gentes, this record is first rate.'