With their music director Federico Guglielmo, L’Arte dell’Arco have travelled through the highways and byways of the Baroque era on Brilliant Classics. They have chalked up recordings of Vivaldi’s complete Op.1‐12, now reissued together as a 20CD boxset (BC95200), but also taken in works by Haydn and CPE Bach, as well as lesser-known works by ‘The Red Priest’. Rhythmic vigour, smooth cantabile phrasing and an alert sense of the rapidly changing moods of the Italian Baroque: these are the hallmarks of their performing style.

For their latest album L’Arte dell’Arco turn to another noted musical son of La Serenissma, Tomaso Albinoni. The twelve Trio Sonatas published as Op.1 were published in Venice in 1694, when Albinoni was 23 years old, self‐described as ‘an amateur Venetian violinist’. In the same year his first opera was staged, and the two works proved to be the springboard for a long and successful career, not lived in Vivaldi’s shadow but pursued across Italy and later around Europe.

The esteem in which his instrumental music was held, even at the time, may be gauged from the fact that no less than Johann Sebastian Bach borrowed certain themes from Op.1 as subjects for a number of his fugues (BWV 946, 950, 951, 951a), and made a realisation of the basso continuo part of the Second Concerto in Albinoni’s Op.2 set. The 12 sonatas of Op.1 all contain four, fairly brief movements, alternating slow and quick. They have been recorded but rarely and there are no other budget-priced new recordings available, making this set all the more attractive to any lovers of Baroque music.