Anyone who finds Baroque instrumental music boring should listen to this! Angela East’s expertise and enthusiasm have long been familiar to followers of The Revolutionary Drawing Room and Red Priest, and she brings to these suites and sonatas an uninhibited expressive style and a determination to present the character of each movement in the strongest, most searching light. Her range of tone is most appealing, and if some of the contrasts – in the Allemande of the De Fesch Sonata, for example – seem to lie outside the bounds of polite 18th-century music-making, that’s perhaps just the impression players in the Italian style gave at the time.

East can also play with refined elegance, as in the Couperin Prélude. However, in the Couperin pieces the purist in me began to feel uncomfortable. Unfortunately, three of them are arrangements by the cellist Paul Bazelaire which make gratuitous alterations to the text, and, believe me, Couperin knew best. And East plays the Plainte, originally for two viols, without the second part, so depriving it of much of its sweetness and charm.

Her Bach Suite is typically full of character. The Prelude is slow and meditative, and the Allemande and Sarabande are also on the slow side. The Sarabande, beautifully poised, has an air of quiet solemnity, but in the Allemande East’s decisive separation of the phrases impedes continuity. These more stately pieces are balanced by forceful, energetic accounts of the Corrente and Gigue, and it’s this intense spirit in communicating the music that makes for a memorable recital.