New London Consort / Pickett, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

Travellers to Venice around 1600 seem to have been ravished one and all by the celestial music-making at St Mark's, with choir answering choir and consort echoing consort from the basilica's corners and balconies. Indeed, the many instrumental sonatas and canzonas contributed to these festivities by the presiding music director, Giovanni Gabrieli, have some claim to be the earliest orchestral music in Western history.

Not surprisingly, the latest attempt by the strings, recorders, shawms, cornetts, sackbuts, theorbo and organs of Philip Pickett's New London Consort - some 20 players in all - to rekindle these glories drew a large audience to the Queen Elizabeth Hall. The event was entitled Sonate Pian' e Forte after one of Gabrieli's most innovatory pieces - in which, virtually for the first time, players were told exactly where to play soft or loud.

Yet not only was this piece excluded from the programme, but we heard precious little soft playing in any of the big concerted items. Maybe Pickett was relying on the innate volumes of the instrumental families to supply the dynamic contrast, but he tended to beat through the chosen items with much the same loudness and briskness - an approach that would surely risk aural confusion in the notoriously resonant acoustics of St Mark's itself.

The QEH is far dryer in ambiance, of course, and it would take a careless reading indeed to ruin the splendour, say, of Gabrieli's Canzon VIII a 8 from his great culminating collection Canzoni e Sonata, published in 1615, with its intricate patchwork of contrasting tempi and wonderfully gruff quartet of low-register sackbuts. But one felt rhythmic and structural ingenuities, textural and expressive contrasts, were continually under-articulated or over-ridden in Pickett's extrovert sweep.

Such qualities emerged rather in the various smaller ensemble and keyboard pieces interspersed through what was, certainly, an effectively planned concert sequence over all: in, for instance, the little Ricercar del duodecimo tuono by Gabrieli's uncle, Andrea Gabrieli, enchantingly assigned to recorders in a side gallery, or in the florid Passamezzo Concertato for two violins and continuo by Biagio Marini, a St Mark's musician during Monteverdi's time, fizzingly played by Adrian Chandler and Peter Collyer.

Best of all was the Toccata Quinta sopra I pedali per l'organo, e senza by the great Girilamo Frescobaldi, who had nothing to do with St Mark's but was a Papal employee, drawing thousands to his recitals in St Peter's. As David Roblou majestically unfolded this paean of contrapuntal paragraphs over marmoreal pedal points, he ineluctably reminded one of the "notes tremendous from her great engine" that Auden's St Cecilia "thundered out on the Roman air".