One of the curiosities of the history of Venetian music is that its first great period, including the work of Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, Claudio Monteverdi and his contemporaries, begins more or less at the point that the Renaissance in painting comes to an end with deaths of Titian and Tintoretto. Between these origins and the time of Vivaldi who died in 1741, there is a rich and continuous tradition in Venetian church music, for all that we tend to be familiar with the repertories at either end of that spectrum rather than those in between. But in the middle, comparatively undiscovered and unperformed, there is a rich seam of fine music by composers such as Alessandro Cavalli, Francesco Cavalli, Giovanni Legrenzi and Antonio Lotti, much of it written for St Mark's Basilica, the principal musical establishment of the city throughout the period.
One of the delights of the present record is that it brings to life a well-chosen selection of these less familiar corners of the Venetian musical world, in particular some intriguing examples from some of the largely forgotten moments in the tradition of instrumental music. There is, for example, Dario Castello's Sonata seconda, a tightly-constructed and economical piece which is here given a virtuosic and at times almost rhapsodic performance by John Holloway. But at the centre of this record is the Venetian choral tradition, and appropriately enough it opens with one of the great monuments of that repertory, Giovanni Gabrieli's In ecclesiis. It is interesting to compare this interpreatation with Andrew Parrot's 1978 L'Oiseau-Lyre Florilegium recording (nla), also made with the Taverners; the new recording gains from a more leisurely and expansive view of the work (at 8'14'' it is more than a minute longer than the older recording) which leads to a performance that is at the same time both stately and sensuous. As with Gabrieli's Canzon VIII a 8, there is some sensational passagework from the cornettists here, a good demonstration of how rapidly standards have changed in this area of period-instrument performance in the last decade or so. In general terms a very high level of achievement is displayed throughout in a sequence of intelligent and carefully-controlled performances that nevertheless sometimes seems to lack the vital ingredient of musical flair.'