Compose violin sonatas, and you can guarantee that someone somewhere will want to lavish affections on them—even if, as here, the sonatas are of baroque provenance and 'affections' are deemed 'unenlightened'. Not that upstanding Handelians need worry too much. Of the six sonatas programmed here, only two (Nos. 1 and 4) have been definitively authenticated; the other four are of 'dubious authenticity' and were first published in the 1730s as part of Handel's Op. 1. 'No. 4' has long been a favourite of violinists and was recorded by the likes of Szigeti, Enescu and Heifetz (who also recorded the 'dubious' No. 6). Aaron Rosand is very much of their ilk, a fully-fledged virtuoso with a fruity tone, a wide-range violinistic vocabulary and a refreshing willingness to sidestep the authoritarian strictures of musical scholarship. He plays this music like a man possessed of its beauty and, like anyone in love, occasionally goes over the top (witness the Op. 1 No. 9 Andante, arranged by Ysaye, on track 25). But his is a vintage style of playing, with subtle slides and a variegated vibrato; it's the sort of sound that is widely derided as inappropriate to the baroque (which, to be fair, it probably is), but that exploits more of the music's expressive potential than the agile, white-toned and highly attenuated playing of certain modern baroque violinists. Not that I entirely agree with Biddulph's annotator Wayne Kiley, who chides ''period instrument performers'' as having a ''cautious and often sterile approach'' to this and similar repertory. Reinhard Goebel is about as flamboyant and exciting a player as you could imagine, and yet his aim and outlook are aeons removed from the red-blooded language of 'the Romantic violin'. Best simply to enjoy the splendours of Rosand's playing for all their worth, accept the octave doubling and harmonic changes in the keyboard part (played, of course, on the piano) and be grateful that the world of music is still democratic enough to accept—even relish—all interpretative options. Hugh Sung offers Rosand worthy support but remains discreetly in tow.'