Elina Mustonen, a harpsichordist from Finland who studied with Ton Koopman, is a fine player, scrupulously attentive to the music and with nimble technique. It would be easier to like her new double-disc set of the complete Partitas if there were not so much superior competition (including selections): classic accounts from Leonhardt, a quirky but still lovable rendition by Igor Kipnis and more ‘recent’ versions, including Andreas Staier’s now more than 25-year-old set for Deutsche Harmonia Mundi.

The principal drawback of Mustonen’s set is the harpsichord itself, a 1993 instrument based on a Couchet original. It often sounds overwhelmed, especially during the too-frequent movements in which Mustonen favours heavy registration. It is generally clangorous and aggressive in character, and it emphasises the rather surprising infelicities of tuning between the choirs of strings. And while good instruments can produce a lovely, light, nasal sound – an essential for contrast – Mustonen’s produces something more sour-cherries and cloying.

All of this makes for an in-your-face wall of sound during too many of the movements in these masterful hybrid works that bring together the full range of Bach’s keyboard style, with its French and Italian roots. Mustonen never lacks for surface clarity but one misses Leonhardt’s more analytical, and often leisurely, X-ray of the music (compare his almost casual back-and-forth between answering lines in the Fantasia from the Partita No 3 in A minor). One also craves something quirky and distinctive, those small discoveries within a little inner movement that suddenly make it memorable. Staier, in the Corrente of the A minor Partita, produces an exaggerated bounce that makes the movement seem full of elasticity and vigour. It is the sort of thing one rarely gets from Mustonen, who plays it straight, as she does almost everything in this admirable but not thoroughly engaging collection.