Arguments about period versus modern instruments in Baroque repertoire may reign forever, but performances in recent decades have proved that commanding music can work its wonders whatever equipment is being used. Although Pinchas Zukerman has railed famously against the early music movement, he doesn’t appear to have ignored what he once found so ignominious, at least not if his ‘Baroque Treasury’ recording with Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra is any indication.

The violinist-viola player-conductor, who served as the orchestra’s music director from 1999 until 2015, operates in all three capacities in these live performances. He leads works by Handel and JS Bach and appears as soloist in music by Bach, Telemann, Tartini and Vivaldi. For an artist who has long championed romantic voluptuousness and expressive urgency, Zukerman here plays with a sense of style and vibrancy that honours the music at hand. Moments of aggressive attack and juicy vibrato sometimes peer around the tonal corner but Zukerman mostly treats the music with buoyancy, point and poetry.

He teams with superb colleagues – Charles Hamann (oboe) and Amanda Forsyth (cello) – in trim, propulsive accounts of concertos by Bach and Vivaldi, while elegantly going it solo as violinist in Tartini’s Pastorale (in Respighi’s transcription) and as viola player in Telemann’s Concerto in G.

As conductor, Zukerman collaborates closely with the excellent National Arts Centre ensemble in the Sinfonia from Handel’s Solomon and Bach’s Third Orchestral Suite, in which the beloved Air receives expansive, dignified treatment and the trumpets are nothing short of stellar.