Maestro di Cappella of St. Mark’s Venice, author of over 20 operas and nearly 150 sacred works, teacher of Marcello, Galuppi and Zelenka and admired by Bach and Handel, Antonio Lotti’s diverse and successful career has latterly been distilled down to just two pieces: the unaccompanied Crucifixus settings for eight and ten voices. Now, in a recording dominated by contemporary premieres, Ben Palmer and his Syred Consort attempt to fill in the gaps and restore the reputation of this Baroque master.

This is music that sells itself. In Ben Byram-Wigfield’s new editions, it emerges lively with rhythmic interest, texts carefully shaded with word-painting and contrasting solo and ensemble colours, supported by light-footed orchestral accompaniments. These are large-scale festal works of tremendous charm. Where Lotti does fall short of his near-contemporary Vivaldi is in melody. More interested in vertical texture than horizontal line (as both Crucifixus settings so clearly demonstrate), individual vocal parts do suffer from a certain anonymity. 

Both Lotti’s Crucixifus a8 and his a6 setting form part of larger stand-alone, Credos. The former is presented here as part of the Missa Sancti Christophori – a composite work created from Lotti’s individual Mass movements by his pupil Zelenka (and supplemented with some pastiche of Zelenka’s own). The result is a half-hour beast of a Mass that sets the sustained anguish of the Crucifixus in context, creating delicious friction with the exuberant Et Resurrexit that follows. Also included here are the multi-movement Credo in G Minor, with its striking Venetian polychoral opening, and the evocative Miserere in G Minor.

Palmer’s accounts are beautifully paced and articulated, aided by the extrovert contributions of the Orchestra of St. Paul’s. But while choral sections are generous and well balanced, step-out solos (particularly among the upper voices) are often underpowered, too white in tone, too uncertain of technique, to give this florid, gilded music its due.

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