Hiro Kurosaki brings a powerful technique and a good sense of musical character to Handel’s violin sonatas. In the first one on this CD, HWV372 in A, he plays the opening Adagio gently and sweetly but brings splendidly crisp articulation to the Allegro that follows, with its rich multiple stops, and is equally energetic in the finale. I admired, too, the expressive cantilena in the opening movement of the G minor and, if a little breathlessly, the rapid and showy execution of the second movement and also the smooth and subtle performance of the final gigue.

There are other ways of playing these movements, but he brings plenty of life to them; and in the opening movement of the D major sonata, the finest of the batch, he finds an aptly noble and elevated style. But the very slow tempo of the Larghetto here and the failure to sharpen the characteristic dotted rhythm make it oddly heavy. The sturdy (I nearly wrote ‘brutal’) treatment of the finale’s dotted rhythms also seems to me uncomfortable, although the brilliance of the semiquaver passages is striking.

There is more brilliance in the little G major sonata, and Kurosaki shows a fine grasp of the declamatory, rhetorical style called for in the opening of the D minor work – I don’t recall hearing this more persuasively done. The beautifully drawn line in the first movement of the A major HWV361 is another high spot; the Corellian second movement is one to relish, too.

There is some tendency to over-characterise: little rhythmic affectations here and there to produce an emphasis, ‘witty’ epigrammatic endings that don’t quite work, and the like. Some listeners may be troubled by the persistent heavy breathing. William Christie accompanies with style and the right measure of enterprise, using the organ in HWV361 and 358 to good effect. He provides a firm enough bass, sometimes using 16-foot pitch, to justify the absence of a sustaining instrument.

I ought to mention that the CD begins and ends with sonatas that most authorities reckon not to be by Handel, in A and F, HWV372 and 370. It excludes two more, in G minor and E, HWV368 and 373, with equal claims to be counted as authentic: those in A and E were in the first edition, those in G minor and F substituted in the second (allegedly ‘more correct’) edition (David Vickers’s booklet note mistakenly says that the two here are both from the first edition). All are flawed pieces, some badly flawed, but Handel’s authorship cannot entirely be excluded and it is a pity that all seven could not be given.