If I hear a recording this year more guaranteed to put a spring in my step than this, then 2024 is going to be a happy 12 months. Avi Avital, the Israeli mandolinist, has been winning encomiums in these pages since 2014, when he first signed with DG. Here he gives us five works that match ‘the corporate vitality’ of the Italian period-instrument ensemble Il Giardino Armonico, with whom he has dreamt of collaborating since he first heard them as a 19-year-old in the Jerusalem Theatre.

His first two choices are adaptations, one fulfilling another long-held ambition, of playing Vivaldi’s Concerto for four violins, Op 3 No 10 RV580. For this he ‘gave himself permission to use the technology to record all four solo parts’ – a ruse that also allowed him to showcase six different instruments created for him over 30 years by his luthier. I think it was Stravinsky who jokingly said of Vivaldi that he did not write 400 concertos but only one, and then copied it out 399 times. It’s true that RV580 is a sequence of predictable harmonic progressions and flourishes from the Baroque period, but the music-making is so effusively good-humoured, so patently enjoyed by the soloist and his collaborators that it is impossible to resist.

The Bach concerto turns out to be an adaptation of the Concerto for oboe and violin, BWV1060R, itself a version of the Concerto for two harpsichords in C minor (now lost). Here, the soprano recorder of Giovanni Antonini takes the oboe part, the mandolin the violin part. Familiarity with the oboe/violin work means an aural adjustment to accommodate the recorder’s plaintive tone and Antonini’s sometimes fussy ornaments, but the two instruments nevertheless blend surprisingly effectively in another perky, airy and playful performance.

Two original mandolin concertos follow, one from the obscure Emanuele Barbella (the first movement threatens at times to become the theme from Blackadder, while the finale fizzes with zesty off-beat accents). The other equally jolly affair is attributed to his better-known contemporary Giovanni Paisiello (Beethoven wrote a set of keyboard variations on an aria from his opera La molinara). The final item is the much-recorded Hummel Mandolin Concerto (his Concertino in G, Op 73, is the composer’s own later version for piano). I can’t think that there is a better version out there. If there is, I haven’t heard it. Avital’s seemingly effortless virtuosity and quasi-improvisatory flights in this audibly genial collaboration will send you on your way rejoicing.