A ‘retro’ cover in Gothic script provides a strong visual cue for this aural celebration of Bach’s first significant life-story: Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s On Johann Sebastian Bach’s Life, Art and Work, published in 1802. Forkel assembled what amounts to a collection of reminiscences; more revealing are the strong musical statements and reports which he offers, many of them supporting the notion of Bach’s supremacy as a keyboard player. Lorenzo Ghielmi builds this dynamic recital on such a premise, on the three instruments which played a seminal or exploratory part in Bach’s creative life. We embark on the young JSB’s famous copying by moonlight of his elder brother’s anthology of keyboard masters, and then we hear the taut invention of the accomplished Georg Böhm, a composer for whom Bach retained utmost respect.

Within Forkel’s reports of ‘perseverance and unremitting practice’ is Bach’s strategy for learning, including transcribing concertos by Vivaldi. Indeed, it’s a nice touch to have Vivaldi performed on the clavichord, as if such foreign novelties required clandestine quietude. Bach’s G major French suite is then juxtaposed with Louis Marchand as a mischievous reference to the keyboard competition between the two men that tantalisingly never transpired (Marchand got cold feet and scarpered). Were Marchand’s ideas really, as Forkel suggests, so ‘empty and feeble’? Listeners can make up their own minds here.

Ghielmi’s playing is rhythmically and structurally strong with outstanding performances of the early works. The French Suite lacks a certain pliancy and suppleness, despite attractive embellishments, as does the Marchand. Poetry is harder to come by than deft and quietly authoritative placement. This is still an immaculately produced and finely conceived programme, even if the connections between between Forkel and the individual works are necessarily tenuous.