Considering his vast experience as a Bach conductor, it comes as a surprise to find that Sir John Eliot Gardiner has not recorded the Brandenburgs before. But then, as he asks in his booklet-note, “what is a conductor to do in this repertoire?” Well, quite. Since period instruments brought with them increasing acceptance that this is really chamber rather than orchestral music, recordings in which the director has not been among the instrumentalists have grown fewer. In fact, Gardiner only conducts Nos 1 and 2 here, these being the grandest; for Nos 3 5 he yields the stage to the English Baroque Soloists’s excellent leader Kati Debretzeni, while No 6 apparently has no director at all. Gardiner’s role in these, he says, was “to facilitate and encourage”, to “give the players some feedback”, and then to sit in the audience.

Nice work if you can get it, you might think, but actually these performances are recognisable enough as being in the Gardiner mould. There is the usual clarity of texture and detail; few accounts of Nos 3 and 6 have such chiselled edges and unobtrusively assertive inner parts. The dynamic contours are strong and meaningful. Tempi are brisk, and while they are not hard-driven in the way they might have been 20 years ago, the finale of No 2 charges to a startlingly abrupt finish. More recent Gardineresque trends can be observed in the tender care taken to characterise the various episodes in the finale of No 1, or in the wisdom and freedom with which he seeks out, but does not overplay, latent bass-line hemiolas in the third movements of Nos 1 and 3. Indeed, the controlled skill with which the joy of such movements is communicated by Gardiner’s players – with Debretzeni, trumpeter Neil Brough, recorder-player and flautist Rachel Beckett and harpsichordist Malcolm Proud among the soloists – is one of the greatest pleasures of this set.

The recording, made at concerts in London and Paris earlier this year, is lucid and democratically balanced but may strike some as a touch dry, while the act of splicing together live performances may be the reason for the odd little tempo shift or bumpy edit. Some may prefer the smoother-lined and more spaciously recorded accounts of these works given recently by Richard Egarr and the Academy of Ancient Music (Harmonia Mundi, 6/09). Some may not. But these are undeniably Brandenburgs of flair and understanding.