Vivaldi's contribution, RV 807, makes for a pointed contrast: vivid but far more economical than Handel's setting, it is also a comparatively late rediscovery. The manuscript surfaced in a Dresden library in 2005, and had been mistakenly attributed to the Venetian composer Baldassare Galuppi — likely because by the time it was copied, Galuppi's name carried more weight in print than Vivaldi's own. Scholarship since has dated the piece to around 1730, late enough in Vivaldi's career that it was probably not written for his usual singers at Venice's Ospedale della Pietà. Rounding out the programme is Vivaldi's motet for solo voice, In furore iustissimae irae, a punishingly virtuosic showpiece thought to have been composed with a castrato's range and stamina in mind, sung here by soprano Lucy Crowe.

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The recording was made in March 2012 at AIR Studios' Lyndhurst Hall in London and released on Harmonia Mundi USA that year — one of the earliest instalments in the five-disc partnership the label had signed with LNM in 2011, not long after the ensemble's founding in 2007. Reviewers consistently singled out the same two things: the pace and intensity Bates draws from the ensemble in the Handel, and Crowe's performance of the Vivaldi motet. American Record Guide called it the clear first choice among recordings of the Handel, praising the vigour and stylistic confidence of Bates's direction, while HRAudio's reviewer described Crowe's entrance in the Vivaldi motet as spine-tingling, the kind of singing that would draw a standing ovation in concert. Opera News and the Buffalo News both highlighted Crowe's control and acrobatic virtuosity, and Early Music Review praised the sensitivity of the continuo playing.

 

Dixit Dominus captures La Nuova Musica in only its fifth year, not long after BBC Radio 3 had called it one of the most exciting consorts in the early music field and the ensemble had picked up its Breakthrough Award nomination — an early marker of the critical trajectory that would carry through the rest of its Harmonia Mundi output and into the Pentatone recordings that followed.