MARBECKS COLLECTABLE: Vivaldi: Gloria in D major, RV589 / Magnificat, RV611

From 1703 to 1740, one year before his death, Antonio Vivaldi was closely associated with the musical activities at the Ospedale della Pietà, a charitable institution for girls. Vivaldi wrote most of his instrumental music, and many of his sacred works, for the girls of the Pietà.

The setting of the Marian canticle Magnificat is for solo voices (originally five girls, three sopranos and two contraltos; but here two distinguished operatic divas, Teresa Berganza and Lucia Valentini Terrani). The Gloria (also designed for girl soloists, two sopranos and a contralto, but again sung here by Berganza and Terrani) has become a choral favourite, though in fact it was discovered, along with much of the composer's sacred music, only as recently as 1939.

It is not every star international conductor who makes recordings of small-scale sacred works written for a girls' orphanage in eighteenth-century Venice, but, in 1976 and 1977, Riccardo Muti with his starry soloists and the impressive Philharmonia Chorus and Orchestra, took up the challenge; and the results, particularly in his direction of the choruses, can be revelatory.