In an episode from Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier’s novel Concierto Barroco, Handel, Vivaldi and a Cuban slave jam during carnevale in Venice. This tantalising image provided the impetus for Manuel Barrueco’s commissioning Roberto Sierra ‘to write a concerto that tried to capture what that might have been like’. This disc comprises Sierra’s Concierto barroco and Folías (a set of variations on La folia), two well known Vivaldi concertos (one originally written for lute, the other for mandolin) and Arvo Pärt’s Fratres in a version for guitar and orchestra. The playing from Barrueco and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia under Victor Pablo Pérez is clear and attractive, elegant rather than overtly expressive – ideal given the neo-classical and genuine Baroque elements of the material.

Barrueco says: ‘I thought the whole CD would be a kind of Concierto barroco.’ And so it is. Cohesion is achieved both by stylistic similarities across the programme and a structure in which Sierra’s pieces provide the ‘outer movements’ to Pärt’s ‘slow movement’. The Vivaldi concertos are interspersed between the new works to provide, in Barrueco’s words, ‘palate cleansers’!

Only a couple of reservations: in the Vivaldi the continuo realisation is a little unimaginative. And I’m not sure about the Pärt: you miss the excitement generated by the violin’s cross-string arpeggios and its legato harmonics, although this kind of arpeggio-work is particularly guitaristic and the harmonics as realised here have a bell-like quality which reinforces the triadic alternation of Pärt’s ‘tintinnabuli’ style. But most will be buying this disc for the Sierra, and rightly so: both Folías and Concierto barroco are witty, highly colourful works, sometimes recalling Rodrigo’s writing for similar forces in their use of folk and Baroque material. They deserve a wide audience.