The British early music ensemble, Red Priest, ended its recent Irish tour at the Coach House in Dublin Castle on Wednesday, courtesy of Music Network. The group in many ways harks back to the early days of early music, when costumes played a far greater role than they do now, and the performers took liberties that later scholarship has frowned on.

Red Priest is a quartet of recorder (Piers Adams), violin (Julia Bishop), cello (Angela East) and harpsichord (Howard Beach, replacing the indisposed Julian Rhodes for most of the tour).

Through the Vivaldi-dominated repertoire of the evening, recorder and violin canoodled, strutted, sweet-talked and browbeat each other, and in ways I have no doubt would have surprised and even astonished the composers whose music provides Red Priest with the vehicles for their collective virtuosity and posturing.

The players go through the motions of plucking notes out of the air and throwing them back again. They handle individual melodic lines with all the extremes of appearance of a split personality, rending and sundering the music to heighten contrast and introduce inner conflict into their raw material.

It's quite a show, this musical pantomime, and the virtuosity of Piers Adams, the musical bedrock and apparent master-mind of all the antics, is at times quite breathtaking. You'll not often hear the recorder played with such abandon, nor see a cellist stand to play her instrument slung over her shoulder like a guitar.

But the purely musical manipulations, the hesitations, the speed changes, the games of peekaboo with dynamics all too often seem geared to match the stage show rather than represent the spirit of what the composers wrote. And that, it must be said, is really a great pity.