In this disc featuring the guitar and lute music of Angiol Michele Bartolotti (c1615-c1682), an Italian musician associated with the courts of both Queen Christina of Sweden and Louis XIV, Scottish Baroque guitarist Gordon Ferries convincingly restores a true master to his rightful place among a pantheon of Baroque guitar composers that includes Gaspar Sanz, Francesco Corbetta and Francisco Guerau.

Ferries has already persuasively explored the music of the aforementioned composers; here he draws on the suite movements in Bartolotti’s Secondo Libro di chitarra (Rome: 1655) to assemble three suites that paint another musical portrait every bit as vivid and exciting. One finds Italian exuberance tempered by French grace; delicate plucking punctuated by fiery, percussive strumming; and, in the theorbo pieces from the 1665 Goess manuscript, sophisticated, harpsichord-like textures of melancholy beauty.

The preludes in all three suites are appropriately free, Ferries’s crisp yet fluid articulation cleanly picking out Bartolotti’s varying textures to give definition to an infinitely flexible pulse. In the livelier dance movements, such as the courantes, brandos and gigues, Ferries emphasises their foundation in bodily movement while skilfully deploying various styles of strumming and a variety of ornaments.

The sarabandes are often similarly adorned but the effect can be sometimes tender, sometimes majestic. This is especially the case with the two sarabandes for theorbo. The wonderful Passacaglie in G minor with which the disc ends makes a worthy peroration, allowing Ferries to display the full range of both his and Bartolotti’s artistry in one compact package.