This is, visually and musically, a special treat for lovers of baroque music. It combines familiar material with rarely heard works in highly skilled and inventive performances. The members of Il Giardino Armonico ("The Harmonic Garden") put their own personalities into the music, much more thoroughly than baroque performers usually do, and the visuals are as striking as the sounds. In this program, Il Giardino Armonico focus on Italian composers, many of whom are relatively unfamiliar but worth hearing (Dario Castello, Giovanni Battista Spadi, Biagio Marini, and particularly Tarquinio Merula and his haunting Ciaconna). But the climax of the program comes in the original instrumentation of three of Vivaldi's most popular works: a lute concerto (often heard elsewhere on the guitar) and two recorder concertos often played on flutes: "Il Cardellino" ("The Goldfinch") and "La Notte" ("The Night"). Photography director Igor Sunara gets surrealistic visual effects with minimal resources. --Joe McLellan
