It is always a pleasure to hear the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, whatever they play. I say this because this particular disc from them may not grab attention on sight, featuring as it does four of Vivaldi’s lesser-known concertos alongside works by Porta, Tessarini and Alessandro Marcello. Venice is the nominal link but there is also a secondary strand lurking here of pastiche and rearrangement: Vivaldi’s Oboe Concerto, RV450, is adapted from a bassoon concerto, while the Violin and Oboe Concerto (RVAnh18) is a composite piece in which an unknown hand has added an oboe part to the first movement of a Vivaldi violin concerto and then composed two new oboe concerto movements of his own. This have-a-go attitude is presumably what inspired the Akademie to commission Uri Rom – an Israeli composer based in Berlin – to produce a ‘quasi-pasticcio’ oboe concerto based on Vivaldian material. Rom is also a Baroque performer himself; and while his L’Olimpiade Concerto lingers longer than Vivaldi tends to, it is not only convincing but achieves arresting expressive depth in its slow movement. Of the other works, Marcello’s fine Oboe Concerto (a work Bach transcribed for harpsichord) shows elegance, nobility and lyrical refinement in equal measure, Porta’s Sinfonia is quirkily and bustlingly theatrical, Tessarini’s Overture more conventionally so, and Vivaldi’s RV576 is one of his rattlingly colourful concertos for multiple instruments.

This last is a good showpiece for the Akademie’s individual talents, and elsewhere they play superbly as a unit as always, energetically detailed if not charming at every turn. Some nimble violin-playing from Georg Kallweit notwithstanding, however, the third ‘theme’ of the disc is undoubtedly the superb oboe-playing of Xenia Löffler, as smooth and swellingly expressive in slow movements as it is ripplingly agile in quicker ones. It is masterly playing and this disc is her triumph.