Here’s a sweet concept for an album: a celebration of the passion for botany – not simply gardening, but an intellectual fascination with the natural world – that took Europe’s well-to-do classes by storm during the 18th century. Among them was Georg Philipp Telemann, who would often write to his musician friends abroad, asking them to send him plant samples; hence a mixed-bouquet programme bringing together varied musical specimens by Telemann himself and a trio sonata each by two friends who sent him plant samples, George Frideric Handel and Johann Gottlieb Graun, all interspersed and unified by rarer musical foliage in the form of three musical miniatures by their Scottish-born contemporary James Oswald: The Tulip, The Hyacinth and The Anemone (three of Telemann’s own favourite flowers) from the Spring section of his Airs for the Seasons collection published in 1755.

The young members of award-winning London-based early music Ensemble Hesperi (violinist Magdalena Loth-Hill, recorders player Mary-Jannet Leith, cellist Florence Petit and harpsichordist Thomas Allery) have brought this carefully considered collection to multicoloured and attractively soft-polished life – think of a playing manner that takes the tack of easy-going, amiably convivial warmth and intimacy rather than super-taut, air-swishing pop, bristle and zing. Appropriately enough, the Telemann works are particularly happy beneficiaries of this approach: his solo recorder Fantasia No 9 in E, transposed here to calmer G, appears gorgeously dulcetly lyric from Leith, her supremely nimble Vivace included; likewise the first of the ‘Paris’ Sonatas with which he made a name for himself in the French capital in the 1730s, where the close-communicating instruments’ sensually poetic voicing and evenly weighted balance produces a showstopper of an Allegro, its radiant exuberance couched within satiny glow; then, while the more madcap virtuosity of his Polish folk-influenced Trio Sonata in G minor (wow, Leith’s rapid Vivace passagework!) comes suitably brighter-hued, there’s still a lovely cantabile nonchalance to it all – although there’s nothing nonchalant about the warmth and expressiveness of the strings’ slow-moving, recorder-embellished Largo lines.

Scottish 18th-century music is an Ensemble Hesperi specialism, so no wonder Oswald’s airs come across with such graceful flair, and I especially love their Tulip hornpipe’s folky inflections. Such an enjoyable programme. Bravo!