The Brandenburg Concertos are such a diverse collection, and at the same time such a familiar one, that it is unlikely that any performance of them will satisfy or dissatisfy entirely. Still, overall characteristics can be made out in recordings where there is strength of personality at the helm, and this is one of them. The Academy of Ancient Music first recorded the Brandenburgs in a rather plain account under Hogwood in 1984 (L’Oiseau-Lyre, 4/85R); this new recording, one-to-a-part like the first, seems from a different world, not just in terms of improved technical command of period instruments – the excellent soloists here include violinists Pavlo Beznosiuk and Rodolfo Richter, flautist Rachel Brown and trumpeter David Blackadder – but also in terms of the interpretative imprint put on it by its directorharpsichordist, Richard Egarr.

Interestingly, Egarr’s booklet-note pays tribute not to the pioneering period recordings of these works by Leonhardt (RCA, 8/81), Harnoncourt (Teldec, 3/67R) or Pinnock (Archiv, 1/84R), but to those of earlier vintage by Cortot (EMI) and Casals (Columbia), and it is noticeable that these performances have moved away from the clipped articulative gestures of recent decades to embrace something of the older tradition of shapely long lines and smooth phrases. It gives the music an easy feel, relaxed and friendly as befits its chamber status, though the downside is an absence of the clarity and brightness one expects from a small band, exacerbated perhaps by the choice of a recording environment more often used to lend its bloom to choral sound (St Jude’s, Hampstead), the addition of a texture-clouding theorbo, and an authentically low pitch of A=392. In short, there is often a frustrating murkiness here, enough to give cause for reservation.

But of course there are good things aplenty: it is lovely to hear the oboes really lean on their suspended dissonances in the last movement of No 1; the first of No 4 has a surprising yearning quality at its speed, the last a feeling for line combined with a spritely tempo; there is a joyful rustic swing in the finale of No 5; and No 6 has suave definition in its first movement before revealing all its beauty in the second (was there ever a finer moment for violas than this?). These Brandenburgs, then, can be both alluring and vexatious. But then, show me worthwhile ones that aren’t.