Christophe Rousset has been moving through Bach’s harpsichord music at a leisurely pace since appearing on the scene a dozen years or so back, and here plugs the last major gap in his recordings of the suites with the six known for no particular reason as French. The qualities he brings to them are the ones we have learned to expect, namely total technical control, habitual elegance of tone and exquisitely detailed touch in both hands.

His normal preference is for a tenderly legato style which he only breaks out of with good reason, to make an energising contrast, say, or to pep up a fast movement with spiky short notes. It is not every harpsichordist who does it that way round, and the result here is that the instrument has time to speak and the music retains a sense of relaxed flow. To put it simply, Rousset’s harpsichord-playing is among the most naturally beautiful around – to hear him gently strum the spread chords in the Sarabandes of the First and Sixth Suites is pure pleasure – and one might argue that the French Suites need little more than that.

Yet attractive as these performance are, to sit down with them and listen more closely is to experience a growing feeling of dissatisfaction. Rousset is cultured, yes, but there is also a coolness which seems to prevent him from exploring the music’s character more deeply, or indeed more flexibly. Sure, he can bring a neat buoyancy to a movement like the Fifth Suite Gavotte, but it is disappointing when, in the First Suite, there is so little distinction made between his already somewhat diffident accounts of the first and second Minuets that you would be forgiven for not noticing that there were two of them at all.

Davitt Moroney is less fluid and inflicts a rather jangly harpsichord on us, but he works a little harder at characterisation, really letting the three-note figures of the Fifth Suite Bourrée skip for instance, while Masaaki Suzuki’s neat performances take a more crisply interventionist (in places one might say choppy) approach to articulation and ornamentation. Rousset’s skills as a harpsichordist are such that he will always be a sound choice, but whether through lack of imagination or reluctance to engage, with gifts like his he is short-changing us.