In between volumes of Masaaki Suzuki’s eloquent cantata marathon, Bach’s instrumental music is quietly forming a comprehensive series of its own. The Suites are, of course, well traversed territory for all the leading period groups, with the best capturing the effervescence of the formalised blueprint of French overture and its parade of subsequent dances – Bach’s four examples arguably the high Baroque’s most significant statement of bold orchestral colour for its own sake.

Suzuki and the Bach Collegium Japan build their studiously conceived readings within the acoustical possibilities of the clean and resonant Shoin Women’s Chapel, whose glowing qualities are incandescently enhanced by surround sound. The musical results are generally pleasing, judged by a consistent level of alert and exciting playing (such as the Allegros of the two suites with trumpets and drums), though what shines on the outside can appear underwhelming from the core of its collective personality. Textures are luminous but do not always rejoice in the warmth and inner lyricism of the devoted part-writing in the First Suite or bask in the emotional intensity or balletic majesté of the Third; the Air ‘on a G-string’ is delicate but disappointingly confined to genial decorum.

Earnestness can give way to movements of great elegance, such as the inégale Courante of the First Suite, a movingly wistful Sarabande from the Second and the galvanising momentum of the Fourth Suite, which is a performance of some stature where glimpses of real engagement, even exoticism, begin to take hold. The Second calls on single strings and the flute-playing of Liliko Maeda is finely moulded, if a touch safe.

I have tended to regard Ton Koopman’s set of 1989 as the yardstick for placement, élan and for promoting the kind of inner muscularity which drives Bach’s rhythms into an infectious whirl of vitality and naturally graceful phrasing – even if Trevor Pinnock achieved much of that in his early set (which couldn’t be recaptured in the remake 15 years later). The Akademie fur Alte Musik, Berlin, provide concentrated discipline and unequalled, white-heat intensity in the Fourth as well as a kind of mathematical exactitude, though there aren’t enough smiles around to make it a real runner.

Here we have, then, a rather uneven set (uniformity of tempo is a slightly inhibiting feature, too), though I’ll return to the Fourth as one of the best readings, and maybe the Second as well.