Depending on how you feel about mixing modern and period instruments, you might interpret Mahan Esfahani’s cover portrait with his face buried in his hands (after Messerschmidt, whose work adorns the covers of Esfahani’s previous Bach releases) as either a despair or a eureka moment. Both are certainly possible. After hearing these performances, I’m firmly in the latter camp.

For his latest release, the Prague-based harpsichordist has brought together all of Bach’s single-harpsichord concertos: the seven of BWV1052–1058, Esfahani’s own completion of the fragmentary BWV1059, and the Triple Concerto BWV1044 – which his booklet note provocatively argues is not Bach’s at all, but a product of the Bach circle.

In period fashion, Esfahani does direct the excellent Britten Sinfonia one player to a part, with the bass shared between cello and double bass and Lynda Sayce’s theorbo discretely filling out the continuo. It’s an intimate yet fulsome, balanced sound which as Esfahani points out is perhaps best appreciated on disc. Jacqueline Shave leads from a 1672 Amati; Michala Petri and Ian Wilson supply the recorders for the Brandenburg-derived BWV1057; Peter Facer’s oboe...