In the booklet notes, Leonidas Kavakos is clearly keen for us to know that he has experimented with playing on a Baroque bow. He recalls how the cellist Natalia Gutman encouraged him to explore Bach with an 18th-century copy, and how ‘everything began taking shape’ – indeed, he found his ‘voice in Bach with it’. And though Kavakos uses a classical Tourte model bow in this recording, you can hear the fruits of these experiences: the playing is abundant with fine micro-gestures and speech-like articulation. I much prefer these results over other ‘modern’ violinists who use a period bow for Bach, yielding no palpable difference, but it’s a fine line. There are moments of ‘translation’ – for lack of a better term – that are unsettling. Take the opening movement to the Concerto in A minor, BWV1041, which is a vigorous and highly enjoyable interpretation (the tempo is excellently judged). Emphatic agogics soon get in the way, and in trying to translate such Baroque gestures for a modern bow, the level of ensemble suffers.

The clarity and vibrancy of sound is fabulous – there’s punch and dance, buckets of rigour and flair. But again, swings and roundabouts: with such brightness of melodic tuning, intonation is an occasional problem (the sequence starting at 4'29" in the opening movement of the reconstructed Concerto in D minor, BWV1052R, for example, needn’t be so sour). It’s strange how some truly classy playing can sit so close to the unaffecting. The Andante of the Concerto in A minor fails to move me (other than to frustration). In its closing phrase – surely one of the most beautiful in Western classical music – Kavakos anticipates the subdominant with premature sweetness, and so that moment of sunshine emerging through the clouds doesn’t quite land. There is a laborious amount of portato reaching unbearable heights from the five-minute mark. Unfortunately, no amount of heavy breathing can disguise the lack of a truly long musical line. Kavakos then further dirties the water with un-notated scales: this join-the-dots practice registers more as an embarrassing get-out-of-Baroque-jail-free card than as ornamentation.