Is the 16-foot harpsichord register making a comeback? Andreas Staier has been making much use of this Landowska-esque device recently – for instance in his Goldberg Variations (Harmonia Mundi, 6/10) – and here now is Aapo Häkkinen having fun with it in this first volume of Bach harpsichord concertos. For him it’s part of a carefully conceived ensemble that also includes a continuo organ and a violone playing mostly at 8-foot pitch, and though you could be forgiven for hardly noticing the organ, so tidily and discreetly is it deployed, the two together add gruff body to the sound without obscuring textural detail. That is quite something in itself, but it also gives that 16-foot sound more space to cut loose, as it does to carefree effect in the running basses of the E major and G minor finales or in the pounding chords and contrary-motion climax of the last solo in the D minor Concerto.

Yet Häkkinen does not wear it out, using it only to increase his dynamic and textural range, and there’s a compelling stillness and minimalism in the solo episode starting at 2'28" in the D minor’s first movement, while elsewhere neat fingerwork is illuminated by the delicate voicing of his instrument, a Hass copy which once belonged to Igor Kipnis no less (though not the one on which he recorded these concertos with Marriner in the late 1960s). Perhaps, indeed, a desire to prevent the rush of sound from taking over can go too far, resulting in some over-clipped articulation and cautious tempi (in first movements mainly), and a deleterious effect on forward momentum. But when they do get going, these performances are enjoyable, even thrilling. And there appear to be no inhibitions in the rip-roaring Italian Concerto that rounds off the disc, in which the harpsichord, transported now to a church acoustic, achieves almost organ-like fullness. Wow!