Like most composers of his time, Vivaldi began his publishing career with sonatas. His sonatas, although just as strongly marked by his distinctive musical personality, are played much less today than his admittedly more numerous concertos. The six here, not in fact from the published sets, are utterly unlike the familiar Corelli sonata model: no serene, rationally worked-out counterpoint, but brilliant violinistic gestures and capricious changes of texture, pace and mood. The actual musical ideas are scarcely different from those in the concertos – the same sequences, the same figuration, the same theme structure. Several of these sonatas were designed with optional continuo parts – that is, they could serve simply as violin duets – but the full versions, as played here, are texturally and harmonically much more interesting.

What they need is two violinists who are lively virtuosos, able to imitate each other closely, match exactly in articulation (or inexactly, if they choose) and frolic happily in thirds or sixths high on the E string (as required a good deal in the finales of RV68 and 70). Certainly that’s what they get here. Messrs D’Orazio and Tampieri play with enormous spirit, exchanging ideas and occasionally elaborating effectively in repeats (notably in the Larghetto of RV70). They find an aptly crisp style for the rather jerky invention in the quick movements of RV71, with its oddly motivic and abrupt ideas. If the effect is sometimes a bit choppy (as in the finale of RV77), it’s clear that that’s what Vivaldi wanted. One movement, the Andante of RV77, is for the violins alone, constantly exchanging roles.

Two of the sonatas are different: one is for violin and cello, again with much imitative writing but of course with a pitch gulf and passages with the lines a 10th apart, and one is for recorder and bassoon, making heavy demands – admirably met here – on the bassoonist’s virtuosity, not only when he imitates the agile recorder but also in Alberti bass patterns (if you can call them that before Alberti’s time). Good continuo support throughout, even if once or twice in the wind piece the harpsichord elaborations seem rather irrelevant.