Angela Hewitt leaves the misleadingly named English Suites as her swansong to what has been a significant presentation of all Bach’s manual-only keyboard collections. Unlike the pieces Bach selected for his published opus, Clavier-Übung from the late 1720s and the French Suites, these six works attracted very little revision in the composer’s lifetime. On the piano and harpsichord, they have undergone a considerable resurgence in recent years. Murray Perahia gave his studied readings and poetic ruminations, especially in the sarabandes, and most recently, the cultivated sensitivity of Blandine Rannou has provided new insights into the way virtuosity is so infectiously paraded by the confident young Kapellmeister. In between there was a notable, if not universally compelling, reading from Sverre Larsen.

Hewitt sets herself apart from all these in several respects, most notably in her crystalline tonal consistency, refinement of touch and elevated articulation. Each nuance brings order and placement to the phrase, her rubati are exquisitely measured, and each embellishment (plentiful in the courantes) judged to perfection. One also understands how she inhabits her world with such utter assurance; comparisons with the self-appointed high priestess of Bach, Rosalyn Tureck, and the maverick Glenn Gould are inevitable in this regard. By ‘comparison’, I refer not to back-to-back similarities and differences in particular works but suggest that each is a Bach performer who, unequivocally, projects a distinctive and instantly recognisable set of values.

This last hurrah from Hewitt does alert me, however, to an ongoing frustration with her approach. In its event-laden and fastidiously voiced Preludes – as one hears in typically persuasive vein in the Preludes to the A minor and F major – and each dance either frenetically or objectively examined, Hewitt has built her stall on many defining contemporary trends of digital excellence, reflexive ‘authentic’ references (which spike the purist’s guns) and all manner of surface finery in the name of good taste. With this comes playing of radiant clarity, mesmerising technical mastery and considerably more beauty of sound than the majority of Bach players can summon. Yet, for me, she rarely gets beneath the skin of the music: the Sarabande of the A minor Suite is, as ever, intellectually super-coherent but the over-riding conceit of dignified loss in this movement is strait-jacketed at source. Surely this can’t be an emblem of what we feel is the pinnacle reached in our culture?

Here, and in her many performances over the years, Hewitt’s extrovert discipline and precision are rightly admired but as we leave the last of her major Bach projects (for the time being, I’m sure), I am left thinking that this is not multi-dimensional Bach playing. I don’t hear an artist who can instil character or gesture outside her ‘controlled environment’, create atmosphere and free associations by setting up subtle hierarchies or by harnassing specific rhythmic characteristics at the expense of others – let alone lift the heart by superimposing new meanings and colours on Bach’s canvas. It all sounds too delimiting and much the same and, as time goes by, I hear rather less Bach than Hewitt when all is said and done.