Intrepid to be sure was Miklós Spányi in 1997 when he began his project to record CPE Bach’s solo keyboard oeuvre in its entirety. Four of the six ‘Prussian’ Sonatas came first (BIS-CD878), music rhapsodic, quixotic and wilful. Spányi, playing a clavichord, didn’t cut corners to say as much. He was both illuminating and stimulating – or infuriating, according to taste. It’s still a provocative disc.

Hardly so is this, the latest in Spányi’s series of the keyboard concertos. We hear a different musician. The extemporaneous enthusiast is now an earthbound practitioner, compliant with the text, figured basses in tuttis also realised. But listen in vain for the once sought-after hermeneutic that lifts the notes off the page – inflected articulation, flexible shaping, emotional commitment. Onward flow is curtailed in the metrical gait to which Spányi limits himself. Inertia dogs outer movements such as the first of Wq43/6, marked Allegro di molto but far from fleet. Puzzling too are the miscalculated tempo relationships in the first two movements of Wq44, the opening Allegretto paced at a stately Andante only three beats faster than the following Andantino. And an unventilated acoustic offers a small orchestra little space or inner clarity. Andreas Staier’s interpretations of Wq43/5 and 6 are the antithesis of Spányi’s earnest pedantry.