Album: Vivaldi and Friends, La Folia etc – Apollo's Fire/Sorrell (Avie)

Borrowings and adaptations were meat and bread to the Baroque composers.

But this disc finds Apollo's Fire in a stylistic jumble. If Jeanette Sorrell's arrangement of La Folia only ignites in the last variation, her adaptation of L'Estate is a marker-pen moustache on the Mona Lisa's face. Vivaldi's Concerto in B minor and Concerto in G survive conservative tempi, while René Duchiffre's idiom-busting "Tango" Concerto for Two Violas da Gamba will either amuse or horrify. With friends like these.