Last year, when reviewing Julian Perkins’s disc of harpsichord sonatas by James Nares (Avie, 8/09), I quoted the claim of one authority on 18th-century music that Nares was, “with Richard Jones, undoubtedly the finest and most unaccountably neglected English keyboard composer of the period”. Well here now is Jones, and if Nares did not quite live up to the billing (good though he was), we can now see that his contemporary merits it to the full. It is not just harpsichordists interested in English music who should be seeking out the mysterious Mr Jones.

His date and place of birth are unknown, and pretty much the only other biographical information we have is that he was a violinist who led the orchestra at Drury Lane in the 1730s, and that he died in 1744. It seems safe to assume, however, that he was a handy keyboard player, because these six Suites or “Setts of Lessons for the Harpsicord or Spinnet”, issued in 1732, show as idiomatically satisfying a range of techniques and textures as you will find in anything published in Europe at the time – including by Bach.

Not that his suites are laid out with Bach-like orderliness. “Setts” seems the better word for these gatherings of widely assorted pieces – some dances, some preludes or toccatas, others labelled simply “Vivace” or “Largo” or the like. But there is a Bachian vigour to much of the music, most noticeably in the robust gigas, as well as a touch of his melancholy poetry in a movement such as the Prelude from the Fourth Sett. Handel’s influence can also be felt, of course, though Jones outstrips the German as a keyboard stylist. Indeed, his music might be summed up as a uniquely successful marriage of the attractive tunefulness of the English Baroque and the most richly effective keyboard writing.

As she did last year with Gottlieb Muffat (Glossa, 11/09), Mitzi Meyerson shows herself an inspired interpreter of neglected composers she believes in. She fully realises this music’s brilliance and expressive weight, yet responds with balletic lightness to its more playful sallies. The sound of her Ruckers-style instrument is handsomely sonorous, as befits one of the harpsichord discs of the year.