Bach’s Partitas were offered by their composer ‘to music lovers in order to refresh their spirits’ and were later celebrated by Bach’s first biographer, Forkel, as ‘brilliant, well-sounding, expressive and always new’. Yet such modesty and enthusiasm respectively hardly convey a character brilliantly realised by Piotr Anderszewski. At one level his playing is ruthlessly disciplined, at another bold and improvisatory; each performance is nothing if not vivid and compulsive.

In the First Partita (the ‘most approachable of the set’ according to Angela Hewitt in her essay accompanying her excellent complete set) his opening is a very moderate moderato, yet his gently musing tempo is complemented by a razor-sharp articulacy and musicianship and the resulting alchemy is at once challenging and deeply satisfying. His ornamentation, too, is both crisp and inventive (he is much too imaginative to give us carbon-copy repeats) in the Allemande and Courante. And while he finds the still centre at the heart of the Sarabande, he is startlingly virtuosic in the final Gigue where he is as free-spirited as he is finely detailed. In the Third Partita you are again struck by the way Anderszewski’s strength of purpose unites so easily with such musical delicacy, and if in the final and great Sixth Partita his opening is more fierce than maestoso (compared with Angela Hewitt’s and even Alexis Weissenberg’s gentler offerings) his playing always carries conviction. The Allemande is more relaxed, less of a plunge into cold water, and the dark dissonance and speculation of the Sarabande is memorably realised.

Virgin’s sound, like the playing, is brilliant and refined and if these performances, for all their quality, are less revelatory than Anderszewski’s earlier discs of Mozart and Beethoven, they still make one long for the Partitas Nos 2, 4 and 5, as well as for a long-promised Szymanowski recording.