Roland Wilson has a remarkable talent for handling the music of the 16th and 17th centuries. His impressive reconstruction of Heinrich Schütz’s Dafne, the first German opera, remains well remembered. His current work will undoubtedly find its place alongside it: this is how the grand Festive Mass may have sounded, with which all of Venice in 1631 celebrated the end of a plague epidemic that had claimed a third of the population. The Doge fulfilled his vow and commissioned the construction of the Santa Maria della Salute church. The Serenissima Repubblica rejoiced, and Claudio Monteverdi provided music whose splendour was hardly to be surpassed. Among other things, he used “slide trumpets”, which allowed for extraordinary tones: they can be seen in old paintings and are heard – reconstructed – in this recording. This is how a republic once expressed its gratitude.