The latest of Avie’s reissues of recordings by Cleveland-based Baroque orchestra Apollo’s Fire was first issued on the Canadian label Eclectra only last year. Its neat and compact programme, mixing familiar pieces with more recherché items, seems designed more for the concert hall rather than for CD, but that should not matter if the music-making has powers to enthral. It is a pity, then, that the better-known pieces – Vivaldi’s Concerto for four violins, Op 3 No 10, and the Concerto for harpsichords that Bach arranged from it – have both received performances elsewhere on disc with a little more drive and, yes, fire.

Jeannette Sorrell’s decision to follow Bach’s example and do a little arranging of her own is an enterprising one – indeed a daring one when it comes to transforming “Summer” from The Four Seasons into a harpsichord concerto. Despite her skill, however, it is not a particularly successful exercise; the harpsichord’s appropriation of Vivaldi’s violin figuration sounds chuggy and foursquare, and the crying shepherd-boy loses his expressive charm. Better is Sorrell’s orchestral arrangement of the Folia variations from Vivaldi’s Op 1 Trio Sonatas, which with its mix of forward momentum and grandeur makes a worthy sister to Geminiani’s better-known Folia Concerto after Corelli. A “real” Vivaldi piece surfaces in the form of the Concerto for two cellos, here given a firmly pointed but (in the first two movements at least) slightly sluggish performance. The disc concludes with a Double Gamba Concerto by Apollo’s Fire cellist René Schiffer (assuming the pen-name of René Duchiffre) – an audibly obvious homage to Vivaldi, though had the Red Priest ever been tempted to write a tango finale, he surely would not have allowed it go on so long. An attractive enough disc, this, though not perhaps not as sparkling as its creators had hoped.