The influx of recordings of Vivaldi's wind-dominated chamber works prompted me to enumerate them in my last relevant review (Chamber concertos, 2/90), now, close on the heels of Cologne Camerata (CC) on Deutsche Harmonia Mundi/BMG come the Chandos Baroque Players (CBP), all of whose offerings are available on other recordings. Both CC and CBP are period-instrument groups, so we may confine our attention to them; each offers six items, four of them common to both discs. The option being open CC use the traverse flute in three concertos. CBP do so only in RV95, which lends its name La pastorella to CBP's disc. Rachel Beckett plays both flutes (CC have a separate traverse player) and decorates the Largo nicely enough, but less fetchingly than Michael Schneider (with CC), and it is CC who attack the final Allegro with the livelier rustic abandon. In the first Allegro of RV105, CC treat the pedal-point passages with charming flexibility, whilst CBP just keep going in straight lines, and their recorder player is marginally the better balanced with the rest in both flanking movements, but in the Largo (a recorder/bassoon duet) it is CBP who score in recognising that too slow sounds too mournful.
Throughout it is CC who are a little more crisp and imaginative, and recorded with the flute a fraction further forward (Rachel Beckett sometimes sounds a bit distant) and the bass department less obtrusive. We are looking, however, at small differences; both sets are admirable and one hopes that the girls of the Pieta managed the wind parts as well as those (of both genders) of CC and CBP—Vivaldi gives the bassoonist a particularly hard time. With so many overlaps it's hard to recommend that you depart in search of both discs, but you will derive great pleasure from whichever one you choose (or happen on first)—and I am unlikely to be alone in hoping that either band (or both) will dip further into this treasury of small delights.'