Riccardo Minasi is a player with lively feeling for theatrical gesture and a technique that comfortably accommodates Vivaldi's virtuosity. He breathes life into these wonderfully expressive concertos with a musical rapport that perhaps responds more readily to bravura passages than to lyrical ones...committed Vivaldians should be delighted.

His virtuosity cannot be doubted and his tone courses like a young stream but a restless imagination looks beyond straightforward niceness and elegance for something deeper, more sharply moulded, in places even darker...This is not really Vivaldi as easy listening...But for anyone wanting a touch of Dionysian poetry, it is a disc worth returning to.

Minasi is certainly an impressive virtuoso and his playing is rhythmically exciting and expressively affecting in equal measure. His account of the Largo of the G minor Concerto, RV327 is beautifully sustained and tenderly spoken. Yet too often, elsewhere, I feel cheated of the music's 'gentillesse' and its lyricism. Notwithstanding such misgivings, though, this is impressive playing by all concerned.