Ever-enterprising in his exploration of all things Bach, Reinhard Goebel here alights on rarities from virtually every 18th-century member of the musical dynasty, from JS downwards and outwards. Only Johann Christian, master of polished galanterie, misses out. The promise of four premiere recordings immediately whets the appetite. Musically, though, it’s a mixed bag. As in so much music from the mid-century, memorable tunes are at a premium. Merrily chortling bassoons enliven an otherwise bland offering from JS’s nephew Johann Ernst. A pleasant D minor Symphony by JS’s second-youngest son JCF (the ‘Bückeburg Bach’) has a pretty, amoroso slow movement and a spiky, Baroque-inclined finale. As to the more famous elder brothers, neither the D major Symphony by JS’s eldest son Wilhelm Friedemann nor two of the works by CPE are authenticated. They sound stylistically plausible, with the odd disruptive harmonic plunge in the fast movements and an agreeable vein of pathos in the andantes. But much of their invention seems generically north German, c1750. For the real, fierily anarchic CPE, turn to the authentic E minor Symphony of 1756, played here in its version for strings alone.

Using modern instruments with an understanding of period style, Reinhard Goebel’s Berlin Baroque Soloists, many of them drawn from the Berlin Philharmonic, are a classy ensemble. Yet for all their polish, precision and care for detail, they left me wanting more. The repeated-note bass lines that routinely propel the fast movements tend to chug rather than fizz. More generally, the combination of modern instruments and some cautious tempos can make CPE’s music, especially, sound too suave and comfortable. In the E minor Symphony the period-instrument Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin (Harmonia Mundi), choosing the more colourful version with wind, generate a far more dangerous abandon in the outer movements and mine the brooding Empfindsamkeit of the Andante. Timings are revealing. Where the Akademie take 3'43" over the Andante, Goebel skips through it almost daintily in 2'02".

Moving to an earlier Bach generation, violinists Krzysztof Polonek and Kotowa Machida scintillate in a double concerto by JS’s third cousin Johann Ludwig. The violins flutter around a solo oboe in the ear-tickling Adagio but the clichéd banality of the fast movements more than once put me in mind of Mozart’s A Musical Joke. The Sinfonia by Johann Sebastian, probably intended for a church cantata, may be a transcription of a work by another composer. But this is music on a different plane, with shades of the third and fourth Orchestral Suites in its hollering trumpets and exuberant sparring for oboes and solo violin. Brilliantly dispatched by Polonek and his colleagues, it rounds off an album of intermittent pleasures in aptly flamboyant style.