It was serendipity that I was assigned this review while in Venice. ‘Al Bunduqiyya’ is the Arabic name for the watery city, and this album from the cellist Giovanni Sollima and Il Pomo d’Oro explores Venice as a place of coexistence between different communities from across the Mediterranean, the northern lands to the Levant. I initially listened to it as I walked through labyrinthine mist in December, and it made the canals and lagoons come alive with these sedimented histories of power, commerce and cultural collaboration.

The most interesting offering is Vivaldi’s Concerto for cello in E minor ‘per Teresa’, RV787. The team have nicknamed it the ‘lost concerto’, for it survives only in its viola part. Slim pickings, you might think. Yet Sollima’s construction, Il concerto perduto (2021), is rich in ideas and different methods of contextualisation. Sollima describes a process of ‘following and “breathing” the viola part almost maniacally’ – even during the bars of rest – to get to the form of a Vivaldian concerto. There are moments taken straight out of Vivaldi’s playbook, but there are others that feel spectacularly alien. Think of the architectural dissonance of Coventry Cathedral – sandstone against concrete – and translate into sound: cycles of fifths slam into dissonances and vibrantly choppy textures.

A more recognisable sound world emerges in the two Vivaldi violin-and-cello concertos, RV546 and RV547, for which there is stiff competition from Adrian Chandler and his ensemble La Serenissima (Avie, 9/18). Charlotte Gardner described cellist Vladimir Waltham’s ‘gently grainy, luminous tone’ and Chandler’s ‘silkier sound’. The octave unison playing from Sollima and violinist Federico Guglielmo is equally energetic but writhes in shades that lie between the primary colours. Sollima’s sound is enjoyably wiry, gristly even, and is an excellent shadow to Guglielmo’s sheen. Elsewhere there’s fabulously delirious vibrato and fun ornamentation.

While I adore the improvisations scattered throughout – these Sollima recorded at night, alone with sound engineer Ken Yoshida in the Scuola della Carità in Padua – I’m not too sure about the overall ordering of the album. But perhaps this chaos is exactly the point: am I lost or am I simply in Venice? This bridge seems awfully familiar …