No one could accuse Christophe Rousset of rushing to record The Well-Tempered Clavier; Book 1 arrives a year after Book 2 (3/15), and two decades after his admired recordings of the Goldberg Variations, Partitas, Italian Concerto, French Overture and Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, made in his early days with Decca L’Oiseau-Lyre. Yet if his playing in these 24 Preludes and Fugues sounds like that of a wise head and experienced hand, it should be said that it somehow always did, especially in Bach. Rousset has ever been at heart a fundamentally serious musician, aligning himself less with the mildly crazy freedom of a Ton Koopman than with the studied control of a Gustav Leonhardt or a Kenneth Gilbert, with whom he shares a reliance on good fingers, very occasional well-chosen ornaments and canny but subtle agogic shaping governed by an underlying sense of steady but continuous flow.

Yet if this sober approach – echoed in Rousset’s somewhat technical booklet-notes – is one that doesn’t always reveal its charms immediately, it is certainly worth sticking with, and indeed makes a sound guide to these wonderful and varied works. Rousset is undoubtedly at his best in the longer and more traditional fugues such as those in C sharp minor, D sharp minor, F minor and B minor, where his care for measured contrapuntal discourse gives them a truly impressive monumental quality; more playful and energetic fugues such as the C minor or the E minor, however, can come across as rather straight-faced, as does the fugato section that drops like a stone into the middle of the E flat major Prelude. Elsewhere the sheer expertise of his playing yields happy rewards: the E flat minor and E major Preludes show how a right-hand line can sing; the E major Fugue leaps into life with a deliciously deft non-legato; and there is great skill in the way he conjures up the orchestral texture of B flat minor Prelude. The B minor Prelude, often treated as a dreamy essay by pianists, is here brisk and no-nonsense, its walking bass sounding like one that wants actually to get somewhere.

I rather enjoyed Céline Frisch’s recent sprightly Book 1; but although I would have liked a less tangy harpsichord and was sometimes irritated by bumpy edits, I also found in Rousset’s considered and classy account a properly stimulating alternative.