The best music effects a kind of time travel on the ear. Turn to the slow movement of the Harpsichord Concerto on this album for a Doctor Who-style journey through simultaneous worlds. Our Tardis is a two-manual iron-frame Pleyel harpsichord, once the property of Rafael Puyana. At once we hear the Baroque grammar behind the angular flourishes of Falla’s late style; then the realised idea of what that grammar sounded like to musicians in the 1930s, exemplified by Landowska’s Scarlatti recordings; finally and unavoidably, a sense of the now in the dedicated historicism of the enterprise, the beautifully balanced recording and the needlepoint articulation of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in quintet form. Benjamin Alard is placed well forwards in the mix, with the ensemble seemingly circled round him one to a part in the manner of Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto, maximising the give‑and-take concerto grosso feel of the finale in particular.

Alard and his Pleyel take more of a back seat for El retablo del maese Pedro. Spicy modal tuning for the opening wind descants transports the mind’s ear no less vividly to an imagined Andalusian dustbowl, bearing the same carefully curated spirit of neoclassical authenticity as The Soldier’s Tale led by Isabelle Faust (11/21) and further enhanced by the brave casting and fearless performance of the narrator’s role by the treble Héctor López de Ayala Uribe. Heras-Casado draws a slightly dirty sound from his players, and then a much more formally elegant body of tone for Stravinsky; the album’s only deficiency is the presentation of Pulcinella in condensed suite form, rather than the complete commedia dell’arte ballet that would have made a natural complement to Falla’s puppet show.