Having played Bach’s Solo Cello Suites on a cello da spalla, an electric Baroque violin with ‘unlimited reverb possibilities’ and a violin in concert halls, Zachary Carrettín chose an anonymous 18th-century viola set up historically – ‘the finest brush’, he noted – to demonstrate with the first three Suites his principle that the treatises and other primary sources are there ‘to provide possibilities, not to limit our scope’.

He plays Bach not only as music but as speech, line, colour, dance, harmonic sonority, balance and clarity of contrapuntal lines. He uses turns and appoggiaturas in spontaneous dialogue and moments of delight. Melodies wander and explore. ‘Metamorphosis’, Carrettín says, represents ‘the freedom, the invitation we all have, to change, to transform, in our lives’. He plays the da capo return to the Minuet of the D minor Suite plucked, the iconically imperious Prelude of the C major Suite as if it were a gentle toccata. And everything is infused with poetry.

And while Carrettín’s playing may be more elegant and disciplined than the wildly abandoned stylus phantasticus playing we expect in Biber and Pandolfi, it is an illuminating step in that direction. The viola negotiates the string-crossings and double-stopped chords with much greater ease than the cello. The sound is lighter than the cello, with suggestions of Bach’s sombre writing for the viola da gamba and viola d’amore in his St Matthew and St John Passions.

This album is Carrettín’s homage to his mentor Kenneth Goldsmith, who was one of the first modern-instrument virtuosos (he studied with Mischakoff, Kroll and Milstein) to champion historical performance practice on the American scene.