Musical sea-sickness pervades this curious recording of Bach’s mesmerising gamba sonatas. The opening bars augur well with the plangent reticence of the Adagio of the G major Sonata but after that Guido Balestracci enters into a musical rhetoric of striking incoherence. It revolves around a policy of pulling up – even stopping – at cadences, a mannerism which bafflingly truncates the phrasing and, at worst, does so when the musical logic suggests otherwise. Blandine Rannou soldiers on but the harpsichord is already so recessed as to establish her role as assuredly supporting.

There are a few moments of relieving ordinariness (such as in the gentle sequencing of the Trio, BWV528) but the great G minor Sonata – a kind of implied concerto – continues to harness the wrong points of interest; rather as in a fine monologue, the sense is distorted by an actor who fails to distinguish between poetic moment and syntactical necessity. The first movement gets slower and more ponderous as the cadences again become the catalyst for needless fragmentation.

The D major Sonata comes out least affected and there is the occasional moment of plausible phrasing, but throughout the gamba sounds decidedly short of the body, colour, bite and personality (odd, given how unrelentingly close is the sound) to convey these remarkable works with the eloquence they deserve. For all the natural facility, severe misjudgement underpins this disappointment.