It started 30 years ago when three musicians with a passion for the Baroque got together to form a band, fashioning an  acronymic name from initial characters of their first names – Sally, Luke (Green) and Tim.

Since then, Salut! Baroque, under its joint Artistic Directors recorderist Sally Melhuish and cellist Tim Blomfield, has established itself as a popular and integral part of Sydney’s early music scene with 11 studio albums reaching a wide audience.

Music to Celebrate: Salut! Baroque. Photo supplied

Their anniversary concert season was launched in Canberra and Sydney at the weekend with a typically enjoyable and immaculately performed program of works by heavyweights Antonio Vivaldi, Georg Philipp Telemann and Pietro Antonio Locatelli and some less familiar names, spanning the 150 or so years of the Baroque – all leavened by an impossibly catchy recorder quartet, Balkanology, by Moravian folk musician Jan Rykota.

Joined by guest Anna Stegmann, who is recorder professor at London’s Academy of Music, Melhuish and fellow recorderists Alana Blackburn and Alicia Crossley opened proceedings with an acappella arrangement of Tarquinio Merula’s 1615 work La Lusignola...