Monteverdi’s most famous sacred work might seem like a bulky museum piece to audiences brought up on modern orchestral and choral music.

But it was written to impress – for the Roman Catholic Church faced with creeping Protestant austerity and for the self-advertisement of the composer, auditioning for the job of musical director at St Mark’s, Venice, in the early 17th century.

Scholars of early music are still at war over the content of the Vespro della Beata Vergine and the way it should be performed. One thing is indisputable: it needs to sound awesome and of a piece, not like some liturgical dirge.

Few have the material resources or access to reverberative buildings that help achieve this end. Yet sensitive performances like this one by the Welsh Camerata and the Welsh Baroque Orchestra, directed from the keyboard by Andrew Wilson-Dickson, show that, everything else being considered, it is possible to reveal its greatness and its intricate delights.

There was no point, for example, in deploying forces for this strongly antiphonal interpretation all over St Mary’s, apart from when echo-sounding effects were required. Instead, a pleasing intimacy was established.

A high standard of solo singing by choir members, especially in dealing sensibly with the rapid florid passages characteristic of Monteverdi, was set at the start and by the final and unifying Magnificat the whole performance had been galvanised.

The confluence of styles from plainchant to madrigal to dance was embraced by the choir and orchestra, led smartly by Simon Jones and complete with emphatic Renaissance cornetti and sackbuts.