Concertos by five composers tracing the meteoric trajectory of the modern violin as music’s star instrument provided a  showcase for the talents of three soloists in the latest concert by Madeleine Easton’s Bach Akademie Australia.

The band’s founder and Artistic Director told the audience that later composers all “stood on the shoulders” of the Baroque masters – Antonio Vivaldi, Jean-Marie Leclair, George Frideric Handel, Georg Philipp Telemann and JS Bach – and went about proving it by knockout performances of five of their concertos.

Bach Akademie Australia’s Madeleine Easton:  The Art of Violin. Photo Keith Saunders

Easton opened proceedings with Vivaldi’s formidably challenging Il grosso mogul Concerto in D major, RV 208, with its massive cadenzas seemingly intent on leaving no virtuosic trick in the repertoire uncovered – double stopping, acrobatic runs across the full range of the fingerboard, furiously fast bowing and bariolage included.

Its first movement made for a foot-tapping and arresting opening to the evening with cello, harpsichord and theorbo underpinning the long upwardly winding lines of the Grave slow movement and the 10 musicians on stage providing the final movement with plenty of clout.

The Italian braggadocio of the Red Priest yielded to the grace, eloquence and subtlety of the French school in the next work, Leclair’s Concerto in D minor, Op. 7 No. 1, one of 12 that he wrote before his murder brought his career to an abrupt halt. 

Bach Akademie Australia: The Art of Violin. Photo © Keith Saunders

This piece moved the spotlight on to Venezuelan-born violinist Rafael Font – a regular with several Australian Baroque ensembles who has played with many of Europe’s storied groups. He brought a smooth authority and nuance to his performance of a work which requires great interplay and understanding between soloist and the ensemble.

There are plenty of demanding passages, especially in the restless momentum of the Vivace finale, and Font handled them with seeming ease.

Handel’s youthful B-flat major concerto, sometimes known as the Sonata a cinque, is a “hugely under-exposed masterpiece” according to British conductor and keyboardist Richard Egarr, so it was good to hear it played live, superbly handled by young Adelaide violinist Simone Slattery.

Bach Akademie Australia: The Art of Violin. Photo © Keith Saunders

After the melodious Handel – a combination of noble and sunny – Slattery was back after the interval for Telemann’s Violin Concerto in A minor, TWV 50:a1, one of 21 such works that have survived and unusual in the fact that it starts off slowly before speeding up and ending in a rather stately dance.

Telemann, of course, was a friend of Bach’s, and godfather to his son CPE, so this work was a neat link to Easton’s return as soloist for one of three Bach works that mark the apotheosis of the genre, the E major concerto BWV 1042.

It made a glorious end to this celebration of an instrument which is so often praised for having the expressive range and beauty of the human voice.

Not an ensemble to do things by halves, Bach Akademie Australia return in November to perform the complete Brandenburg Concertos in one concert.