Shakespeare was pretty blunt about people who didn’t like music, saying that anyone who “is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils”.

This quote from The Merchant of Venice inspired and neatly encapsulates Salut! Baroque’s program for their opening concert of the season in the unfamiliar surrounds of the Long Room at Sydney’s Customs House, a stone’s throw away from the Conservatorium where they normally play.

The “sweet sounds” are provided by four recorders imitating human voices floating in four-part harmony above Tim Blomfield’s five-string piccolo cello for the opening piece In Nomine Crye by Christopher Tye, who died when the Bard was still a “whining school-boy with his satchel”.

The quartet – Anna Stegman, Sally Melhuish, Alana Blackburn and Alicia Crossley – interweave seamlessly creating a mellow consort, richer in tone than the more familiar setting for viols.

Salut! Baroque. Photo supplied

Blomfield and his co-founder and Artistic Director Melhuish have compiled a program featuring five composers who all flourished in the early 18th century, but in two of the hotbeds of Baroque music, Italy and Germany.

The greatest of these, Georg Philipp Telemann, like his...