The name says it all. “Concerti per una vita”: concertos for a life. And what a life, if we are to believe not only the biographers but, musically speaking, our own ears. Priest, teacher of orphaned girls and violin virtuoso, yes: but prodigious lover, sorcerer and spy? As Olivier Fourés writes in the lively booklet note accompanying this highly entertaining new release from Le Consort, “Yes, Vivaldi gets tongues wagging.”

Either way, there’s another biography here, that of Le Consort’s director Théotime Langlois de Swarte: “Vivaldi was of decisive importance in my passion for the violin.” He goes on to describe listening to Vivaldi’s music “all the time” as a child, while also singing his music in a children’s choir conducted by his mother. So these two lives, composer and performer, come together in a double musical portrait, with works illustrating Vivaldi’s life at various periods performed with a passion nourished by a lifelong obsession.

Actually, that’s not the whole truth: there are the other members of Le Consort, whose number waxes and wanes according to the size of forces required,...