Although Beatrice Rana has dazzled us with her Prokofiev, Chopin and Ravel, she has also recorded a much admired account of the Goldberg Variations (4/17). ‘Bach is an important figure in my life’, she says. Now she has turned to four of his keyboard concertos, bringing to them her strong fingers, diamond-cut clarity and infinitely graded touch, attributes in themselves enough to make a fine Bach player. But Rana’s quality was never going to be in doubt, was it?

What excites here are the pathways she finds through the music in a journey that demonstrates her total control of dynamic, tempo and articulation, yet leaves nothing to be desired in terms of honest expression. Her ability to pull the listener towards her in the most intimate of pianissimos is a special skill, but never seems a trick because it always has a context: the ABA-form siciliana slow movement of the E major Concerto opens in a whisper before gradually building to a passionate arrival at the da capo; the long pedal-point passage near the end of the D minor’s impulsive first movement recedes into barely flickering half-light before undergoing a forceful but measured release into forte. Such moments show that, as in her Goldbergs, it is Rana’s long-range handling of tension and dynamic – sometimes running across conventional structural boundaries – that locks the listener in. Hers is a rolling landscape, always on the way from one thing to another.

What’s more, she wastes no effort on clumsy articulations, dynamic jolts or other try-too-hard surprises, as some Bach pianists do. Instead, the impression is of a player who, while always in command of her instrument, has fully committed herself to the emotional contours of Bach’s music. Nothing reveals this more clearly than the way she draws the shapely lines of his slow movements. That of the F minor Concerto, one of Bach’s most sublimely airborne melodies, has poise, simplicity and the beauty of seamless legato, the slow movement of the D major no less so. Equally but differently gripping is the Adagio of the D minor – moody, restless and complaining, and attaining sharp anguish at its climax.

Of course, such confidently thought-out performances cannot always have everything. I thought some of the finales a little rushed – a notch slower would have brought more definition, in the E major especially – and some of the big cadential hold-ups are hurried through. The first movement of the F minor, by contrast, is surprisingly staid. I also found the rather vague balance on the strings washed away a lot of their nuances, and while they are mostly alert and precise, their response to a potentially gorgeous moment of their own – the passage of answering contrapuntal strands in the first movement of the D major – is somewhat sleepy. Rana’s mastery of Bach, however, is clear as day.