Nobody knows much about Nicola (or Niccolo as the record company has him) Fiorenza: he taught in a Naples conservatory and played the violin in the royal chapel there around the middle of the 18th century, and died there in 1764. His compositions, mostly from the 1720s, seem to be exclusively instrumental. Those presented here aren’t much like any other music of the period that I know.

The concertos, taken to be for recorder rather than transverse flute, are in old-fashioned four-movement form. The textures and structures are often eccentric. One movement in the A minor concerto has fugal tuttis, for example; in the C minor work the violins bustle around in rapid triplets during most of the solo music, while in one movement of the G minor they disport themselves in lively dotted rhythms under the recorder line. The actual invention, too, is often unconventional, even if Fiorenza tends to use a lot of sequences, Vivaldi-style. The scoring with three violins and viola in two of the works leads to some sumptuous string textures (in the F minor the lost original first violin part is carefully reconstructed here). And in the two trio sonatas the writing is often concerto-like, with ritornelli in full texture alternating with sections for violin and continuo. The one in B minor has a curious but attractive finale somewhere between gigue and siciliana. Clearly Fiorenza had his own ideas about the genres of his day. Fêsta Rustica, playing one to part, capture something of the individual voice behind this music. The recorder playing of Giorgio Matteoli – who, by the way, plays the cello in the sonatas – is sharp and clear, the strings energetic, too much so perhaps in such fast movements as the finales of the C minor Concerto and the D minor Sonata, where it gets a bit rough. The recording is excessively resonant, and not helped, to my mind, by the use of the theorbo in some of the music in preference to the harpsichord. The F minor and C minor works are indicated in the wrong order on the back and in the booklet.