Brother to the more famous Alessandro, who composed more than 60 operas, and uncle to Domenico, whose 555 sonatas are one of the mainstays of the baroque keyboard repertoire, Francesco Scarlatti spent his life as a choir master, first in his native Sicily, and later in the British Isles, where his music was performed in London and at the Three Choirs festival; he apparently died in poverty in Dublin in 1741. Francesco’s own music is hardly known today, but one of the Armonico Consort’s earliest concerts, 20 years ago, included both of his surviving large-scale choral works, a Dixit Dominus and a Mass. As part of the group’s 20th anniversary season they have programmed the two again, before recording them.

The pieces both date from the early 1700s, when Scarlatti was maestro di cappella in Palermo; they are written for a 16-part choir, divided into four groups, with an orchestra of strings and trumpet. But as these performances under Armonico’s director Christopher Monks vividly demonstrated, those forces are often employed in a strikingly distinctive way. In the Dixit Dominus psalm setting verses for the full forces, sometimes fugal and occasionally densely chromatic, are interspersed not with the usual solo numbers but with sections highlighting each of the voice types in turn, while the mass draws very selectively on the full Latin mass – there’s no Credo or Agnus Dei – though the use of antiphonal effects and the deployment of solo voices is just as striking.

The crisp, sparkling accounts of the two Scarlatti works were each preceded by violin concertos from the same era, with Rachel Podger as the soloist – the 12th of Vivaldi’s Op 4 set La Stravaganza, and Bach’s A minor concerto, BWV 1041. Accompanied by just a handful of strings and continuo, they were full of carefully defined detail and easy give-and-take, the best kind of intimate period-instrument performances.

• At the Forum, Malvern theatres, Great Malvern, on 5 February.