In 1985 I heard Maurizio Pollini perform Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1 and remembered his playing as straightforward, somewhat austere, well judged in terms of tempi, and ornamentally conservative. Apparently the pianist examined the music anew before finally committing his interpretations to disc nearly a quarter of a century later. Although my earlier impressions remain intact, I hear greater fluidity and warmth now, or perhaps I’m just listening better. Pollini will have none of the agogic stresses, dynamic hairpins and tiny rubatos sprinkled throughout Angela Hewitt’s 2008 remakes (Hyperion, 6/09) and he avoids tempo modification as much as possible without managing to sound the least bit metronomic.

How does he do this? Close listening reveals minute changes in tone colour, subtle and strategic deployment of the piano’s una corda pedal, plus long phrases and fugal textures that have beginnings, middles and ends but no dead spots. A good example of this is the A minor Fugue, where the often entangled polyphony emerges with uncommon differentiation and character. Also notice introspective Preludes such as the E flat minor and B flat minor, where the accompanying chords’ moving parts fully present themselves without artificial highlighting. A few aggressively dispatched Preludes yield slightly blurry results (the G minor) and at least one tiny wrong note (in the C minor) that slipped past Pollini’s perfectionist radar.

Some listeners may be turned off by the distant and slightly over-resonant engineering – less attractive than the fuller-bodied Ashkenazy (Decca, 3/06), Koroliov (Tacet, 6/00) and aforementioned Hewitt editions – while others may more readily embrace its concert-hall realism, plus the fact that Pollini’s habitual vocal grunts and groans recede more into the background. Is Book 2 in the works