Johann Ludwig Krebs was among Bach’s most accomplished students, and like many of his students and Bach’s sons as well, he lived in an age of musical upheaval. New textures, gestures and conceptions of drama were emerging, and the older Bach’s inexhaustible counterpoint seemed, to many, mostly exhausted. This fascinating and meticulously performed second volume of Steven Devine’s survey of Krebs’s keyboard works demonstrates the range of musical invention possible during a few decades of the mid-18th century, including characteristic French dances, bravura figuration reminiscent of CPE Bach, a hint of Haydn and some fugues that are simultaneously old-fashioned and forward-looking.

In his booklet essay, Devine writes: ‘The three works on this disc, at first listening, may appear to be from completely different composers, such is the diversity of compositional style.’ But Krebs is no chameleon, and there is a distinctive sensibility throughout the music recorded here. The Overture in G minor was published in 1741 and opens with the expected dotted-rhythm regal display, followed by a fugue with a strongly chromatic profile. Kreb’s fugues tend to get a bit clotted and overwrought but they are endearing for their oddity, at times suggesting the foursquare themes and slow accumulation of incident and motion of earlier masters, and other times looking forwards to the freer textures and harmonic surprises of later 18th-century figures.

The Partita in B flat is from a collection of six (only three survive), and here we find Krebs sounding more idiomatically French than his master, Bach. The opening Prelude is a magnificently florid aria against slow-moving harmonies, followed by another chromatic and wayward fugue. The final work, the three-movement Sonata in A minor, puts us in the world of CPE Bach, opening with parallel lines and rapid harmonic contortions, and throughout a tendency to episodic thinking, music not woven but cobbled together from magnificently motley material.

Devine is an expert and subtle guide. The buff stop is deployed to fine effect in a minuet from the Partita and he takes a barely perceptible but effective inégalité in the Allemande from the same work. The dances are idiomatic, the ornamentation clear and precise, and the final sonata is dashed off with gusto.