It’s a strange fact that, although it is generally accepted that Bach intended The Art of Fugue for harpsichord, recordings of it on that instrument are uncommon compared to those on piano or organ, or in ensemble transcriptions. Not that this collection of masterly workings of the same austere but shapely fugue subject doesn’t work perfectly well in those other ways; it’s just that you would think harpsichordists would have been more eager to claim it. Christophe Rousset got a lot of the most important Bach repertoire down in the early part of his career, and although he has not hurried since (his last significant release was the ‘48’ in 2013 and 2016), The Art of Fugue has arrived now as the last major missing work.

One has to be careful with recordings of this piece, as not everybody’s idea of what it consists of is the same. Rousset follows the order of 13 fugues (or ‘Contrapuncti’) and four canons as presented in the posthumously published edition of 1751, but omits the final unfinished triple fugue on the basis that there is no evidence that Bach intended it for inclusion. It’s (very nearly) the same scheme Gustav Leonhardt initiated in his admirable, intellectually weighty 1969 recording (DHM, 10/79), and Rousset also recalls Leonhardt in his interpretative approach, which sets out the contrapuntal discourse with care, seriousness and clarity. If it can seem rather deliberate in places, tempos generally a notch up from Leonhardt’s ease away the Dutchman’s sometimes didactic feel, while a gentler-voiced harpsichord and less oppressive recorded sound also throw a kindlier light. Rousset’s springy treatment of dotted notes in the explicitly French-style Contrapunctus 6 and the gigue-like 13 (Rousset is joined in this and the other invertible ‘mirror fugue’ for two harpsichords by Korneel Bernelot), as well as light détaché in the running Contrapunctus 9 and some dancelike articulation among the canons, also add to his performance’s overall personability.

This is a satisfying and authoritative Art of Fugue, then, which one might imagine as a more 21st-century version of Leonhardt’s reading. But for a version that matches it for integrity while at the same singing with a touch more sweetness and freedom (and that gives you the triple fugue in incomplete and completed forms), Davitt Moroney’s stimulating Gramophone Award-winning 1980s recording (Harmonia Mundi, 5/86) still shines strongly.