If all the fanfare surrounding I Fagiolini’s release of Orazio Benevoli’s polychoral Mass based on Palestrina’s famous Tu es Petrus has whetted your appetite for more of the same, you won’t be disappointed by the second recording in the series. Benevoli’s Missa Maria Prodigio Celeste or Missa Benevola is a grandiloquent setting for four choirs, here presented with three of the choirs doubled with instruments from The City Musick. 

Attended by the same high production values as the first disc, the engineering reveals a wealth of detail in Benevoli’s accomplished writing as well as a myriad of vocal glosses that border on the ecstatic. Intimate, heartwarming sections sit amidst music that was meant not only to evoke the glory of God but the power of the papacy. (Sample the awesome heft of “simul adoratur et conglorificatur” in the Credo.)

Interleaved with the Mass are two motets by Benevoli’s more famous contemporary, Giacomo Carissimi, Paratum, cor meum and Super flumina Babylonis. The...