The young French early music group Le Consort has form when it comes to uniting Baroque’s biggest names with near-forgotten, never-previously-recorded ones – all the way back to its 2019 debut album partnering Corelli with Dandrieu. But this latest piece of musical matchmaking between two of early 18th-century London’s biggest names and one of its most mysterious might be its most warm-hearted, consummately performed yet.

Musicologically, this is a cleverly harmonious trio: Henry Purcell, master of the English Baroque’s sweet melancholy, who absorbed the affettuoso and dance styles emerging from Italy and France into his own sombre polyphonic heritage; Neapolitan virtuoso violinist Nicola Matteis, drawn to London by its proliferation of new theatres and concert halls, who developed his own brand of lyrically virtuosic Anglo-Italian melancholy in its honour; and the anonymous, charmingly sobriquet’d Mrs Philarmonica, who in 1715 published six sonatas displaying yet another personality-rich melding of English melancholy with the Italian style, most audibly that of Corelli.

Equally harmonious is the actual programming. For instance, we open on the sighing rise and fall of the Andamento malinconico from Nicola Matteis’s Suite in G minor. This is then answered by Purcell’s four-part Sonata Z807, also in G minor, subtly different in its Anglo-Italian sensibility, its internal climaxes painted with plangent virtuosity by violinists Théotime Langlois de Swarte and Sophie de Bardonnèche – listen from 5'30" to the precision and shaping of their individual rapid scalic lines, fusing together one moment only to leap back apart the next. Next it’s to the slightly older-world, Corellian warmth of Mrs Philarmonica’s Sonata terza in G minor, its own pleasures including the twinkling poetry of harpsichordist Justin Taylor’s Largo embellishments and cellist Hanna Salzenstein’s smart Vivace virtuosity. Onwards, and always it’s this deft shaping and technical polish at the micro level, within the context of a wider end-to-end narrative.

Further joys? The ensemble’s new arrangement of Purcell’s Trumpet Tune in C, ZT698, full of exuberant rhythmic swing, daintily nimble one moment and gorgeously gung-ho the next. Matteis’s Suite in A minor, for which the ensemble is joined by violinist Louise Ayrton: its Sarabanda amorosa’s loving violin blending; the cornucopia of vibrations and ornamentation colouring its Gavotta’s merry mix of deep-dug wildness and lighter delicacy, all rounded off on a delicious throwaway whisper. The Largo from Mrs Philarmonica’s Sonata quinta in C minor, the success of which depends on its interpreters’ capacity to bring varied affect and careful architecture to its repeating theme, and which here is surely everything Mrs P could have wished for.

It’s all so fresh. Historically informed performance worn so naturally, and works known so intimately, that these musical stories could have come from Le Consort’s own pens and souls. Highly recommended.