Vivaldi: Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione, The Four Seasons
These days it's fashionable among Baroque music aficionados to say that  only the young Italian groups likeIl Giardino Armonicohave the  flair and imagination to makeVivaldi's concertossound  exciting instead of routine. Well, it isn't necessarily so.The Four  Seasonsis surely as overexposed as classical music can be, yet the UK-based  Raglan Baroque Players and the gifted violinist Monica Huggett make enchanting  and even exciting music out of it. Their playing is clean, energetic, and  rhythmically supple--granted, they don't go to the astonishing extremes of tempo  you sometimes hear fromRinaldo  Alessandrini and Concerto Italiano, but they're a long way from  "sewing-machine Baroque." Dynamics are another matter: Huggett, in particular,  plays daringly softly at times--and her courage pays off, drawing a listener  close as if to hear her whisper secrets. (It was brave also of Virgin's  recording engineers not to pump up the volume electronically.) Along withThe  Four Seasons, this two-for-one budget reissue includes the other eight  concertos that Vivaldi published in his collectionIl cimento dell'armonia e  dell'inventione("The Contest Between Harmony and Invention"). Huggett and  her colleagues play them with verve, but to these ears, at least, most of those  remaining concertos don't have the same inventiveness and spark as their more  famous counterparts. (Concerto No. 10, "The Hunt," is engaging, however, as are  the double concertos that round out the second disc.) This release is an  excellent value, although you probably shouldn't listen to it all in one  sitting.--Matthew Westphal