Both those pieces look back to an earlier era in which Baroque music was manipulated: the early twentieth century. The Chaconne of Tomasso Vitali and the famed Albinoni Adagio travel some distance from the original sources, but this time Red Priest seems to be less out to shock and more interested in reflecting on what it is it's doing. The two ground bass pieces, however, are a bit less outrageous than those on previous releases.

Pirates of the Baroque offers more of the same, with a wholesale reconceptualization of a group of Couperin keyboard movements into ocean scenes, some amped-up Vivaldi, and enough shouted pirate jargon to make the disc appropriate for your next Talk Like a Pirate Day party. Even when the musicians play the music relatively straight, there are fireworks resulting from tempo alterations, musical quotations, the reassembly of fragments of works into whole new pieces to fit the album's theme, and so on. Earlier Red Priest albums have used extended ground-bass Baroque pieces as a foundation for everything from heavy metal to bouzouki music, all executed on the four Baroque instruments. And that's good, because as a rule things get plenty hairy. That ensures that, no matter how hairy things get, there's a musical anchor for the listener. Red Priest, whose name comes from Vivaldi's nickname, reduces Baroque scores to a consistent quartet of recorder, violin, cello, and harpsichord. Whether you're new to Red Priest and wondering where to start or already familiar and interested in following the direction it is going, here's the rundown. It's of a piece with the others, but somewhat different. Pirates of the Baroque, however, is not a reissue but an album newly recorded in 2006. The first, if you want to take them in sequence, was Priest on the Run.

The chronology of its recordings may be difficult to divine from copyright dates or online date orderings, for the group recently acquired the rights to its earlier albums and began reissuing them on its own Red Priest Recordings label. The outlandish English Baroque group Red Priest has been around since 1997.

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