If you thought baroque music was boring, think again. With Red Priest, it becomes a fun, affair, as shown with their Pirates of the Baroque. From the moment the group appeared in their piratical attire, they captivated and enthralled. Serious musicians might tut, but the audience was having a ball and enjoying the virtuosic skills of the four players.

The theme drew together an intriguing collection of pieces based on stolen ideas, freely-adapted arrangements and other examples of musical skulduggery. Take Handel’s Aria Amorosa, for instance, which the composer shamelessly copied from an operatic aria by the German composer Reinhardt Kaiser. Or Jean-Marie Leclair’s Tambourin and Tomasso Vitali’s Chaconne, both ‘borrowed’ and liberally adapted from the baroque repertoire. The Pirates of the Baroque suite – an imaginative arrangement of Francois Couperin’s music by the group’s keyboardist Howard Beach, which captures a day in the life of a baroque pirate. The result was a slick, polished entertainment that was visually as well as musically exciting, presented with tongue-in-cheek humour and panache. But among the clowning around there was sincerity, too, in the way the music was lovingly played by four baroque specialists. Julia Bishop (violin), Angela East (cello) and Beach impressed throughout with playing that was by turns sensitive, passionate and fluid, but it was Piers Adams’s quicksilver fingers, on a range of different-sized recorders, that really commanded the attention.

Baroque music dull? In Red Priest’s hands, never.