Not only purists but Bach-lovers too would be well advised to sit this one out; for the disc’s avowed purposes are to illustrate Skip Sempe’s theory that ‘in the act of performance a performer must make the score his own’ and the huge sonorities of which two closely recorded harpsichords are jointly capable of producing. The resultant heavy-handedly noisy and libertarian treatments are examples not so much of poetic licence as of licentiousness. One merely cringes at the free arrangements of music by Marcello, Vivaldi, Reinken and Duke Ernst of Sachsen-Weimar that first passed harmlessly through Bach’s hands, but is goaded to protest at the indignities insensitively heaped on pieces such as Bach’s own Preludio to the E major Violin Partita. Sempe, how could you? And be photographed laughing happily at your vandalism?'