Neat, eh? Concerto Italiano playing ‘Concerti Italiani’. Rinaldo Alessandrini’s group build their latest disc around a violin-concerto orchestration of Bach’s Italian Concerto, the idea being to show what Bach understood by the term ‘Italian Concerto’ by presenting it alongside the original versions of four Venetian concertos that he studied in early life and transcribed for solo harpsichord or organ.

Whether the idea sustains an hour’s listen is more open to question. The Italian Concerto makes a pleasant and serviceable violin concerto, escaping many of its keyboard limitations – the slow movement gains a softness it never had on the harpsichord – and creating only a few of its own, mainly to do with balancing orchestra and soloist. But Bach’s interest in the other concertos seems to have been in their formal procedures rather than their vitality, which is just as well because only Vivaldi’s familiar RV565, for two violins and cello, really has much of that.

The Benedetto Marcello Violin Concerto (its lost solo part reconstructed from Bach’s transcription) lacks sustained momentum; Vivaldi’s RV316a is not the Red Priest at his most compelling; and the Alessandro Marcello Oboe Concerto is notable principally for a slow movement displaying the kind of dreamy Venetian lyricism that you tend to forget as soon as you have heard it. You sense that someone realised things needed pepping up when you spot Vivaldi’s atmospheric flute concerto La notte – a piece with no Bach connections – added on.

Neither does this disc present Concerto Italiano at their best. The soloists from within the group are fine, and the performances are stylish, intelligent and attractively recorded, but the surging energy we are used to hearing is often strangely absent. What with occasional moments of scrappiness, you have to wonder if their hearts were quite in it.