Claudio Monteverdi dedicated “Vespro della Beata Vergine,” or “Vespers of the Blessed Virgin,” to Pope Paul V, and soon thereafter was appointed as maestro di cappella of San Marco in Venice. The piece depends heavily on echoing acoustics and was perfect for the Venetian cathedral. In our own city surrounded by water, the best nonecclesiastical setting for this otherworldly work has to be the Rose Theater, a marvel of reverberation housed at Jazz at Lincoln Center. As part of the Mostly Mozart Festival, conductor Diego Fasolis pulled together three disparate groups for a rather run-of-the-mill performance.

The vocal group Coro della Radio Svizzera is from the beautiful Swiss town of Lugano. With soloists, it numbered 19 singers for this event.

Les Sacqueboutiers is a quintet of cornet and sackbut players from Toulouse, France. And rounding out the forces was I Barocchisti, a period instrument group, also from Lugano, that boasts the rather unusual talents of Maria De Martini, who doubles her mastery of the flute with bassoon performance.

The aggregate sound was certainly interesting, although somehow unsatisfying. The instruments were suitably raucous, still carrying the medieval sound of the consort in their bags of tricks, but the assembled choir did not impress in the early stages.

Dixit Dominus is a real fire-and-brimstone piece, but the chorus could not seem to muster the proper degree of vocal intensity. Even as Mr. Fasolis sought to inspire the singers with big conductorial gestures — he looked as though he were leading Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand” — his singers responded with rather anemic sound production. Something was amiss, but what?

Once the first soloist, a counter-tenor, intoned, the problem became clear. This respectable group of singers is simply as advertised, a hardworking parish choir from the provinces. Over time, a parade of soloists passed by, but none were remarkable, and at least one struggled mightily.

One of the undisputed highlights of this unique piece is Duo Seraphim, an echoing conversation between two of the guardians on high. One of the two tenors, however, had a devil of a time with his angelic music, bleating out some of the most disturbing melisma imaginable. As he fought in vain for the proper pitch, his counterpart only made things worse by hitting all of his notes perfectly. An embarrassing few minutes.

Mr. Fasolis certainly attempted to enliven the proceedings with his kinetic energy, at one point running onto the stage to take a flying leap onto the podium just in time to give a downbeat, and the singers all gave their best efforts. Had this noble experiment been offered in a local church, it would have seemed a fine reconstruction, but, in the context of the Mostly Mozart Festival in a sold-out theater, the evening was a bit tepid.

Any mounting of this often reshuffled work will bring cavils from reviewers. Here the group performed only one of the two settings of the Magnificat and jettisoned some of the instrumental interludes, which some scholars view as apocryphal. But this current version is the equal in legitimacy of any other, as this particular debate is notoriously muddy. If only the choral sound had not followed suit.