Venezia Millenaria is as kaleidoscopic as the city itself, Venice’s trademark cosmopolitanism reflected in Savall’s augmenting of his home team(s) with Ensemble Panagiotis Neochoritis, and an East-meets-West musical bazaar where western instruments rub up against santur, oud and duduk…No-one who loves Venice (or Savall’s boundless, creative curiosity) can be without this life-enhancing, utterly intoxicating release.

No one anthologises as expertly as Savall and, in these increasingly specialist days, possibly no one else could present a millennium of music with such quality, depth of scholarship and attention to the detail of performance practice across the board. From Byzantine chant to baroque, Savall draws intensely atmospheric performances from his motley forces, enhanced by outstanding immediacy and clarity of sound in beautifully balanced Hybrid SACD recordings.

The characterful instrumental playing of Savall and his colleagues is reflected throughout in the vocal numbers, where colour and drama are prized above beauty, singers captured as though overheard by an anthropologist rather than engineered by a producer. The effect is wonderfully immediate – a snapshot not just of a city but of a spirit of music-making that Savall has pioneered.

Savall’s forces place atmospheric Orthodox and other non-western music alongside pieces by composers from Beethoven to Dufay, performing it all with panache.