These days it's fashionable among Baroque music aficionados to say that only the young Italian groups like Il Giardino Armonico have the flair and imagination to make Vivaldi's concertos sound exciting instead of routine. Well, it isn't necessarily so. The Four Seasons is surely as overexposed as classical music can be, yet the UK-based Raglan Baroque Players and the gifted violinist Monica Huggett make enchanting and even exciting music out of it. Their playing is clean, energetic, and rhythmically supple--granted, they don't go to the astonishing extremes of tempo you sometimes hear from Rinaldo Alessandrini and Concerto Italiano, but they're a long way from "sewing-machine Baroque." Dynamics are another matter: Huggett, in particular, plays daringly softly at times--and her courage pays off, drawing a listener close as if to hear her whisper secrets. (It was brave also of Virgin's recording engineers not to pump up the volume electronically.) Along with The Four Seasons, this two-for-one budget reissue includes the other eight concertos that Vivaldi published in his collection Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione ("The Contest Between Harmony and Invention"). Huggett and her colleagues play them with verve, but to these ears, at least, most of those remaining concertos don't have the same inventiveness and spark as their more famous counterparts. (Concerto No. 10, "The Hunt," is engaging, however, as are the double concertos that round out the second disc.) This release is an excellent value, although you probably shouldn't listen to it all in one sitting.