Having placed Bach’s St John Passion in its liturgical context for recent performances, John Butt’s excellent Dunedin Consort now do the reverse with Monteverdi’s publication of vespers music. Gone are all plainsong antiphons and other contextual additions; what is presented instead is a varied collection of individual pieces of sacred music. This is a shock, though the recording sounds fresh and clear, emphasising transparency without a big reverberant acoustic. But the voices that suit Butt so well in Bach do not quite have the edge for the Italian rhetoric of Monteverdi; not much here is as exciting as Nigel Rogers in Andrew Parrott’s famous small-scale recording.
