AJ IBO/Huggett

National Gallery

To violinist Monica Huggett, interpretive individuality comes as naturally as breathing, and it has been the life force behind her two-week, six-programme concerto-athlon with the Irish Baroque Orchestra.

The imperative of reading the music imaginatively, of consistently avoiding plain, straightforward solutions, has meant that the familiar works in the series - Bach's

Brandenburgs

and Vivaldi's

Four Seasons

wore just as well as the less familiar ones - Handel's

Op 3 Concerti Grossi

and the eight also-ran concertos from Vivaldi's

Op 8

.

The ultimate concert showed how Huggett's trust in the element of surprise can cut two ways, leaving the listener sometimes challenged, sometimes invigorated.

On one hand, in the first movement of Brandenburg Concerto No 4 the weighty spelling-out of Bach's patient argumentation denied the music its natural, graceful impetus.

In the concluding allegro of Handel's

Concerto No 5

too, the urge to accentuate all the details, to bring out every last brushstroke, made this movement neither menacing nor cajoling, but an uneasy mixture of the two.

On the other hand, the super-heightened imagery of Vivaldi's

Winter Concerto

, with Huggett as soloist, was positively avant-garde in effect, to the extent that would make it hard ever again to be satisfied with a more decorous account of this work.

Huw Daniel zipped through the solo violin part of Vivaldi's

Concerto No 7

in a style that was by turns incisive, richly embellished and highly colourful. In the Bach, once the opening deliberations were out of the way, contributions from Andreas Helm and Hannah McLaughlin on recorders were pleasing and well balanced.

Indeed, it was the fugal movements of Handel and Bach that proved the most fulfilling of all, with each crisp metrical figure relishing its own characteristic crunch, and every cross rhythm paradoxically blending tension and flow.