This is a disc of timely reminders: that Andreas Staier, now such a familiar figure at the fortepiano, is no less prodigiously gifted on the instrument with which he originally made his name; that the young Bach, whose works are the recital’s subject, possessed a personality and talent that was daring, virtuoso, even (dare I say it) wilfully wayward; and finally that those much-derided “modern” harpsichords which prevailed in the first part of the last century were not so very out of touch with history after all.

Of these, it is perhaps the last which is the most intriguing; Staier plays a copy of a 1734 harpsichord by the Hamburg maker Hieronymus Albrecht Hass. This carries a lot of those colourful technical devices that the move to historic instruments around 1970 made seem so vulgar, things such as the lute stop, buff stop, even a mighty 16-foot register – you can hear the last dancing bear-like through the sixth variation of BWV767, filling the Sarabande of BWV818a with majesty, and creating a thunderous finish to the E minor Toccata. This is music contemporary with the most extrovert of Bach’s organ works, and when the Hass fires all its guns there is no mistaking the fact. What prevents it all from sounding gaudy is a faultless touch from Staier which maintains sonorous good tone (well served by Harmonia Mundi’s richly present recording), an agility across the keyboards worthy of any organist, and characteristically fast fingerwork which is as crisp and precise in the noisy stuff as in the more intimate and mellow moments of BWV992 and BWV818a. Harpsichord-playing over the past few decades has been dominated by a sonic purism which has frowned on “excessive” register changes but if you can surrender yourself to Staier’s mastery of them the excitement is hair-raising.