It's no exaggeration to say that over the last five years Rinaldo Alessandrini and his band of singers and instrumentalists have redefined the parameters of performing Italian music from the 17th and 18th centuries.
They began with revelatory performances of Monteverdi, which demonstrated the supreme value of using native singers for madrigals in which the texts and their settings are symbiotically linked, and have steadily broadened their scope to include the vocal and instrumental works of his successors with equally startling results.
Until now, though, British audiences have only been able to marvel at the Concerto Italiano through their recordings. Their debut at St John's, Smith Square on Wednesday - a real coup for the Lufthansa Baroque Festival - was no disappointment: this was a concert of immense variety, virtuosity and passionate commitment, a baroque interpretation of superlative quality.
There was no Monteverdi, alas; instead the programme was anchored by cantatas by Vivaldi, Salvatore and Alessandro Scarlatti, all of them tragic little scenas, shared between the soprano Elisabetta Scano and contralto Sara Mingardo, with Alessandrini conducting from the harpsichord and his quintet of strings grouped around him.
It's a wonderfully democratic ensemble, not because there are no stars, but because every one of the performers has real presence and character. In Farina's extraordinary Capriccio Stravagante the strings were in the spotlight, relishing every one of the outrageous onomatopoeic effects, which range from cats and dogs to hurdy-gurdies and Spanish guitars; in one of Corelli's Concerti Grossi (Op 6 no 4) the playing of the first violin Francesca Vicari was dazzling, the cohesion and understanding of the group utterly immaculate.
The two singers first demonstrated their neat musicality in a duet from Handel's Aci, Galatea e Polifemo - the higher voice silvery, effortlessly agile, alive to every fleck of colour, the lower sensuously expressive, rounding out every word. Mingardo built Vivaldi's "Cessate, omai Cessate" into a portrait of suicidal intensity; Scano brought Salvatore's "Allor che Tirsi udia" to nerve-wracked life; both of them dovetailed with real theatricality in Scarlatti's "Dove fuggi, o bella Clori." All unfamiliar pieces and all real gems when delivered with the authority and consummate sensitivity that was imprinted on every phrase of this concert
