This is an attractive addition to the vast array of recordings of Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers collection.

This latest recording from Pygmalion favours a middle ground, light in gait, soft-edged in tone, stopping short of the extremes of grandeur of utterance or parsimony of expression...the solo singers here are top-drawer and the instrumental playing is imaginative. Pygmalion’s recording has strong merits of its own.

Their new Vespers is impeccably authentic from top to bottom, and yet at the same time it’s big, operatic and vigorous. Don’t let the blockbuster opening alarm you; this is not a uniformly crash-bang-wallop account. Far from it. The contrast between the first movement and the first of the psalm-settings, Dixit Dominus, is enormous..This could very well be the performance of the Vespers to have.

There is a sense of religious devotion to be heard here, as of course there should be, but what is so powerful is the expressive urgency that Pichon, his soloists and his Pygmalion ensemble so fervently bring to the music. If period performance still aims, as it always has, to restore the shock of the old for the ears of today, then this is period performance at close to its very best.