The durability of John Holloway and Lars Mortensen’s musical collaboration, and the length of their relationship with this music, gives it a freedom and flexibility that risks translation into mannered performance in many modern recordings. Here, though, it is energetic and focused but never aggressive – like a newly polished version of the Baroque performances of the 1970s and ’80s, when the edges were rough but the outlook was of a brave new world.

The addition of Jane Gower’s dulcian for the Castello (and some of the Fontana) gives the repertoire a compellingly eccentric voice, marooned somewhere between the Venetian cori spezzati of Gabrieli and Monteverdi and the foreshadowing trio sonatas of Arcangelo Corelli. They are written ‘in stil moderno’, so stick resolutely to the basso continuo rules of his time, but there are still such strong traces of the Renaissance canzona there, too, that just hearing the music itself, regardless of this infectious, quick-witted performance, is a revelation.

Although the Castello feels like the most important music on this disc, the sonatas of Giovanni Battista Fontana with which it is juxtaposed are just plain beautiful, and played so. And that the trio sonatas are among the earliest examples of that genre, written in a period and city where the violin itself was evolving at a rapid rate through the work of makers such as da Salò and Maggini (who died alongside Fontana when the plague reached Brescia) makes their performance by such a spearhead of the early music movement as Holloway particularly affecting.