The most recent foray into Mozart’s Salzburg church music pairs his most popular Mass from the period with the first and lesser known of his two Vespers settings, composed around the same time, 1779. The Mass – a favourite of choral societies – sells itself, and its attractiveness is enhanced here by Howard Arman’s impeccably drilled Munich choir and a quartet of charismatic soloists. The Berlin period band offer unassailable support, not least the oboes and horns, whose timbres are so integral to the sound world of this work.

The less familiar Vesperae de Dominica is a harder sell but one to which these musicians are nonetheless equal. Aspects of the musical language and its deployment are recognisable from the better-known Vesperae solennes de confessore of the following year – the texts are the same, the ‘Laudate pueri’ set to austere ‘antique’ counterpoint and the ‘Laudate Dominum’ an aria for soprano. If it doesn’t give up its secrets as readily as the later setting, it’s still a piece of solid workmanship, briskly devotional in the style expected at Salzburg Cathedral but tinged with the drama and operatic reminiscences that make Mozart’s sacred music of this period so unique to him.

Katharina Konradi fearlessly scales the coloratura of the ‘Laudate Dominum’ – it’s a far cry from the blissful cantilena of its counterpart in the Solemn Vespers – and takes the lead in the brief offertory Alma Dei creatoris. An Epistle Sonata, K329, is placed between the Gloria and Credo of the Mass, and is the only place where the strings sound a little undernourished: were their numbers slimmed down so as not to swamp the chamber organ?

I hope Arman explores more of this repertoire. His Coronation Mass challenges the first instalment in Christoph Poppen’s recently launched series for Naxos with its go-ahead tempos and superior recorded balance. Recent challengers in the Vespers deploy boys’ rather than women’s voices (Novum, 10/11; Hyperion, 8/12), but Arman proves a match for my longstanding mixed-voice recommendation in the Mass, the Cologne recording by Peter Neumann – whose epistle sonata sounds well-fed in comparison.