It's often a mistake to ascribe national characteristics to musicians, but there's something very mediterranean about the playing of the Italian baroque group Il Giardino Armonico. The very first phrase of the opening work - Handel's Concerto Grosso Op. 6 No. 6 - was an expansive gesture moving from one dynamic extreme to another, with a warmth and almost glutinous smoothness more sparingly employed by northern bands.

But it was the repertoire in particular that seemed to thaw Viktoria Mullova's violin playing. She can be a chilly performer; here, however, in Vivaldi's C major concerto, her characteristic precision, technical assurance and elegant understatement was allied to a buoyancy perfectly suited to the rumbustious first movement. In the second, a slow movement from the same tense world as Vivaldi's Winter, she effortlessly and beguilingly wove frosty cobwebs of decoration between the icy repeated notes of the orchestral violins.

The final item, the same composer's D major concerto, called the "Grosso Mogul", was even better. Its attempts to imitate the imagined exotic sounds of the Mughal court are more like a hoe-down, but it's a striking piece, with Vivaldi cranking aspects of his usual virtuoso violin writing up to double speed and with plenty of interest in the accompaniments.

Giovanni Antonini was an efficient, unobtrusive conductor in these and in Vivaldi's Concerto for Four Violins and Cello, in which Mullova and her colleagues enjoyed putting individual stamps on the solo parts. But in the purely orchestral items - the Handel and the Concerto Grosso in A minor by Giuseppe Sammartini - his direction was full of ardent detail, bringing out performances of persuasive phrasing and dramatic contrast. Antonini was himself the soloist in Sammartini's Flute Concerto in F. Directing energetically as he played, he conjured unhelpful memories of Little Britain's fey Scottish hotelier; but alongside all that swaying came some inventive improvisation and playing of surprising sensuality.