Boris Begelman, the highly acclaimed leader of Concerto Italiano, frequently takes on the role of soloist in the many concerts that Rinaldo Alessandrini’s celebrated orchestra devotes to the music of Vivaldi and his contemporaries. High time then for Begelman to take centre stage in one of the Vivaldi Edition’s solo violin recordings.

This ninth concerto volume sees the welcome return of Rinaldo Alessandrini’s ensemble, which already features in thirteen albums of the Vivaldi collection. In this purely instrumental repertoire they excel as much as they do in vocal music, deploying generously sweeping melodic lines, inspired dynamics and a musical language already mastered to perfection yet always interpreted anew.

And indeed there are wide new horizons opened up in these late concertos of Vivaldi, who from 1725 on adapted his style to the evolving tastes and changes of fashion, to what Cesare Fertonani calls “the aesthetic of sensibility.” The Red Priest here excels with “the novelty of his formal choices, the dramatic tension of the works and their theatrical dimension, but also through the expressive resources, the emotional affects represented in the music.”

This eminently virtuosic and refined style is glowingly illuminated by Boris Begelman, in the animated Allegro movements so full of fantasy (RV211, RV346) and improvisatory charm (RV283, RV194); but also in the central movements, marked by a supple, sensitive, sometimes dreamlike melodic grace (RV211, RV346).