Just when you think that the well of new angles on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons has truly run dry, along comes another one. This version is a first recording project from Jordi Savall’s all-female orchestra of young alumnae (aged under 39) who have emerged from the orchestral academies run by his Le Concert des Nations and the CIMA Foundation. His soloist is Alfia Bakieva, whose career straddling the worlds of baroque violin performance and folk music makes Vivaldi’s own folk elements very much home ground for her. The album offers The Four Seasons both with and without their accompanying sonnets, between which sit four other concertos including No 10 from L’estro armonico, and the central movement of a late concerto scored for scordato (mistuned) solo violin.

We’ll never know how genuinely linked The Four Seasons are to the female musicians of Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà. The set was published in 1725 when Vivaldi’s relationship with the institution was not the intense, subservient one of earlier days, but instead one that had him simply supplying two concertos a month; and the preceding period had included a stint in Mantua in the service of Prince Philip of Hesse-Darmstadt, where he may have met the set’s dedicatee, Count Wenzel von Morzin. Yet there’s still resonance to this music now being performed by a modern all-female orchestra, even if the actual listening experience is informed by more tangible factors. Prominent among the latter are Olivia Manescalchi’s sonnet readings, which preface and in some cases punctuate the movements. If you like your music served straight up, you’re likely to be gravitating towards the instruments-only version after the first listen. That said, Manescalchi reads (in Italian, thankfully) with infectious spirit, and with tremendous musicality to her tone and metre.

Album-wide, the musicians themselves serve up an attractively lightly buoyant, silvery-sounding, refined sound whose continuo combination of lute, chitaronne and harpsichord has at times an almost dulcimer-like quality to it, which feels a good match for Bakieva’s delicate, folk-tinged voicing. In The Four Seasons, Autumn is especially striking for the opening ritornello’s folky embellishments and the colourful, quiet suavity with which Bakieva plays drunk. Winter’s first movement is one of the more careful I’ve heard, but with its own brand of drama. It’s nice, and strangely unusual, to have La tempesta di mare – the fifth of Vivaldi’s Op 8 set, following on immediately from The Four Seasons – on the same programme, allowing for comparisons with their respective storms. In Il mondo al rovescio the solo violin and cello are enjoyably in agreement with each other. The overall recording is very nice, the ringing acoustic of Cardona Castle contrasting with pleasantly dry soloist capturing.

In short, possibly not a desert-island keeper but classily dispatched, with a sound world all its own.