The ubiquitous titans of late 17th- and 18th-century Italian string music—Corelli, Vivaldi, Tartini, Locatelli, Scarlatti, et alia—finally take a back seat in this recent spate of recordings in order to leave room for some of the lesser-known craftsmen to shine. The composers recorded here have attracted renewed musicological interest in recent decades, yet many of them have remained woefully underrepresented in discographies until now. Each of these albums presents a distinctive case for why recuperation is timely. Four of these albums constitute individual portraits of composers experimenting with the galant style. Their names will likely be unfamiliar to casual listeners, and a great many of the pieces on these recordings are in fact world premieres. This may be because these works had previously fallen into the gap separating the more familiar territories of ‘Baroque’ and ‘Classical’. It may also be because they demand a particular type of attention. Those thirsty for Baroque melodrama or narrative may find this music superficial or trifling, while those with a taste for Classical formalism or intellectual rigour might consider its schematic architecture lacking in complexity, even dinky. The artistry of this music resides at the surface, with focus directed towards the compositional craft with which all tastefully formed component parts have been balanced to one another. It is the musical answer to sprezzatura, that essential quality of ‘studied carelessness’ typical of the courtly environment whence it came—of a world in which appearance was everything.