It tickles the imagination: the thought of composer Claudio Monteverdi arriving in Venice, perhaps in the pouring rain. He would have been desperate to ensure that the musical sketches he carried with him didn’t get wet, or meet an equally watery end by falling into the Grand Canal. Monteverdi needed a job, and those sketches might help to provide one.

Sacked by the Duke of Mantua owing to cutbacks in the ducal budget, Monteverdi had been out of work for about a year when a vacancy came up at St Mark’s, Venice. He would have preferred a prestigious post in Rome, but St Mark’s certainly wasn’t to be sniffed at. So he arrived in town for interview armed with samples of his work — the bare bones of a collection of church music that was to become famous as the 1610 Vespers.

“You wonder how Monteverdi’s interviewers came to any sort of conclusions from the score they were shown,” Edward Higginbottom, director of music at New College, Oxford, told me. “There is no such thing as a full score, only the bass part — a bassus generalis — and some of the essential things for the solo items, as a guide to the players. But the big psalms only have the bass part.

“So how did the interviewers come to any conclusions? It’s an intriguing question. They couldn’t pick up a complete score, or listen to a CD of the music, or download it from the Internet. They must have been influenced partly by Monteverdi’s reputation, and quite possibly he was also given a practical test in St Mark’s itself.

“He was very astute with the Vespers,” Edward Higginbottom continued. “There’s a whole range of styles: some of the music is conservative, and some of it really progressive. He was right at the front of his game, having an ear for the then new melodic style, where you have extremely expressive solo lines that are very responsive to the texts, and also draw in instrumental colours — the Magnificat section of the Vespers is the showcase for that.

“Monteverdi doesn’t oblige you to use instruments much in the sequence of pieces as a whole, but when you get to the climax of the Vespers, each section of the Magnificat is differently scored. You get a kaleidoscope of colours: different voices, different instrumental settings.

“But at the same time he doffs his cap to the old ways by having these colours as embroidery around traditional plainchant. Someone is always singing that plainchant line: that’s the close affiliation with earlier practice. It wasn’t like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, he wasn’t kicking over the traces.”

Monteverdi’s Vespers were published exactly 400 years ago, in September 1610. Although not written for St Mark’s, they are always associated with that great, grand Basilica, with its echoing spaces and multiple choir lofts making it possible to produce a wide range of musical effects.

Inspired, no doubt, by singing in St Mark’s, pictured, New College Choir has made a new recording of the Vespers to celebrate the 400th anniversary.

What, I asked Edward, are the challenges of recording this music 400 years on?

“The singers require agility: it’s likely that Monteverdi would have performed this music with single voices to a part, not with a choir. It’s that old chestnut as to whether this piece is for a choir, or a small vocal ensemble.

“The other thing is that I can’t transform New College Choir into an early 17th-century Italian group. The choir has its own authentic identity. It’s 30-strong, because that’s how many our chapel stalls hold, including 16 boy trebles because that’s how many the founder wanted. It’s an instrument in its own right, so I have to bring that instrument to this particular task.

“Therefore there’s no attempt to bring the listener exactly into the early 17th-century Venetian sound world. We meet the work partly on its terms, and partly on our terms. But we hope we don’t traduce it.”

New College Choir is using the Vespers to launch its own CD label, entitled Novum.

lNew College Choir’s newtwo-CD set, entitled Vespro della Beata Vergine 1610, catalogue no NCR 1382, is available from local music shops, or online from newcollegechoir.co.uk