Most people associate New Year with Viennese waltzes. But at the Wigmore Hall, where The King's Consort's New Year's Eve concert is an annual event, baroque music has become something of a tradition. The Consort chose a programme of Vivaldi concertos to see out 2003, prefacing the familiar Four Seasons with three rarities that revealed a markedly different side to the composer.

We regard Vivaldi primarily as a sensualist, forgetting he was actually a priest, who wrote most of his orchestral scores for the pupils and nuns of one of Venice's grandest convent schools. The pieces that opened the concert - concertos for viola d'amore and cello, then a double concerto for viola d'amore and lute - are all characterised by severe devotional austerity. Placed beside them, even The Four Seasons takes on spiritual aspects: a meditation on the manifestation of God's glory in the cycles of nature, rather than a playful example of pictorial whimsy.

Under their director Robert King, the Consort aimed at authenticity, allotting the solo lines to the leaders of the various orchestral sections, rather than deploying starry guest instrumentalists. Although there were drawbacks, the results were often admirable; there was a remarkable sense of cohesion, of soloist and ensemble thinking and functioning as one, rather than juxtaposed in dramatic contrariety.

Violist Dorothea Vogel was, however, over-tentative in the Viola d'Amore Concerto in A, her playing only gaining in surety when she was joined by lutenist Lynda Sayce for a beautifully contemplative performance of the D Minor Concerto for Viola d'Amore and Lute. There was warmth and wit in violinist Simon Jones's playing of The Four Seasons, but also some moments of suspect intonation. Best by far was cellist Jonathan Cohen, weighty of tone, gaunt and anguished in the G Minor Cello Concerto, a work of shocking brevity and intensity that ranks among Vivaldi's greatest.