This recording, made in 1975, sounds unlike almost any later recording of
Vivaldi, with its lusty American choir that digs into attacks as if they were football cheers. It's a sound that will be familiar to anyone who discovered Baroque music in the 1960s and 1970s, with full-throated singers, modern instruments, boxy sound (ignore claims of audiophile quality on the back cover -- the levels actually seem to max out into distortion a few times), and an admirable level of sheer enthusiasm for music that had come into broad public consciousness comparatively later on. This reissue of the original Orion recording by the Marquis label is sloppy. No biography is provided for the Carmel Bach Festival Chorus and Orchestra, which is the main ensemble featured; there is a biography for the Master Chorale of Washington, which does not appear on the disc; and it's hard to tell which group (there are also tracks sung by the Paul Hill Chorale) is singing on which track. Nevertheless,
Vivaldi's large double-chorus setting of the Beatus vir text, Psalm 111, is worth hearing in this version. There's a sheer devotion in the performance that's rather uncanny; despite the fact that the Carmel Bach Choir was clearly drilled within an inch of its life, it executes the long scales and tough sixteenth-note duos in the
Vivaldi with beauty as well as with precision and brio. Listen to the split basses lay into their antiphonal lines about a minute and a half into track 9 -- you just don't hear that kind of choral vigor much these days. The a cappella Renaissance pieces that follow the
Vivaldi and two Monteverdi motets on the disc are less successful, but things recover at the end with the
Haydn Missa Brevis known as the "Little Organ Mass," even though the program as a whole doesn't make a great deal of sense. There's more idiomatic
Vivaldi out there, certainly, but if you grew up hearing the lyrical recordings that first popularized
Vivaldi's Gloria (RV 589) and other choral music, listen to this one -- it'll take you back, and it'll make you realize that love for the music goes a long way toward making a satisfying performance.