Considering how much music the industrious Vivaldi wrote, one should not be surprised when Julia Lezhneva's new album Alleluia opens with what sounds like a snatch from his Four Seasons.
The bristling string workout is, in fact, the introduction to a motet, In furore iustissimae irae, one of four on the disc, alongside similar pieces by Handel, Porpora and Mozart.
In these times, when record companies search desperately for a concept to hang an album around, this is a clever one, with each motet taking the Russian soprano along a path of spiritual redemption to a celebratory Alleluia.
You are hooked from the start. Il Giardino Armonico is a top-flight Baroque band while conductor Giovanni Antonini, the baton behind Cecilia Bartoli's recent Norma, is a stickler for high-tensile pacing, with the rhythmic snap of the crustiest Italian bread.
Lezhneva's individual voice was already apparent two years ago on her debut CD. Not only did her ornamentation have a lightness and rightness, but she delineated drama where others might have merely unfurled passagework.
