“A unique new recording – one player a part” is how this recital of four keyboard concertos is billed. Alas, the Decca publicists make extravagant claims: one recalls the likes of Gustav Leonhardt, Bob van Asperen and many others who have, for decades, successfully performed these pieces in this most obvious chamber-music (and perhaps “authentic”) medium, as one imagines Bach and his immediate family playing these works at Zimmermann’s coffee house as part of the Collegium Musicum concerts.

Never mind; Ottavio Dantone and his Italian colleagues provide beautifully transparent and balanced renderings. The problem, however, is that the single strings exchange their material with the solo harpsichord so self-consciously within the prescribed language of current Italian Baroque orthodoxy, especially in the allegros: aggressive, jabbing quavers, dentist-drill lunges and contrived rhetorical placements. The last movements of the A major and E major concertos are prime culprits. Where has that great indigenous warmth, passion and line gone in this music (I think of the forgotten gems of I Musici)?

Most successful among these exquisite Leipzig works, which Bach reshaped from earlier concerto and cantata models, are the slow movements where Dantone lets the music breathe with a degree of genuine lyricism. A further sense of redemption is felt in the F minor Concerto where the musicians alight splendidly on the work’s luminous elegance and purpose. If only more of this disc had been allowed to escape the pressing neurosis of much modern-day Baroque performance.