Not even in 1978—the tercentenary year did the recording industry come close to putting all of Vivaldi's concertos into the market place and neither, a decade later, has it yet. There is still plenty of scope for disproving the time-dishonoured quip about how many times he wrote the same concerto and Berne Camerata take advantage of it: the CD catalogue shows only two of these six (RV158 and 401) and LPs add only one version of RV498. It would be futile to deny that Vivaldi was somewhat addicted to sequences and prone to use and re-use certain harmonic progressions, but when this leads you to think 'I've heard this before' his inventiveness in devising new ways of dressing them up frequently says ''Maybe—but not like this!'', the soloist's lines in the first movement of RV278 prompt such a train of thought as early as band 1. But then there is something to beguile in all six, as, for example the framing of arco with pizzicato strings in the second movement of RV158 and the varied conversations between the pairs of violins and cellos in RV575, one of two concertos Vivaldi wrote for this unusual combination—the other, RV564, is available on CD.
Of course it isn't just what you do, it's the way that you do it; Berne Camerata do it very well indeed. The basic string band of 13, slightly augmented in RV575, handle their non-period instruments in such a way that only a rabid purist could take offence, economical with weight and vibrato crisp in rhythm and dynamic contrast; the harpsichord is always as audible as it needs to be. The soloists are no less commendable on all counts and the woodwind players suppress the more aggressive characteristics of their modern instruments, Thomas Sosnowski performs the rare feat of making Vivaldi's demands on the bassoonist seem perfectly reasonable. All that remains to make this package irresistible is the pristine and well-balanced recording, as it indeed possesses.'