There is delicate ornamentation present here (and not Baroque-specific ornamentation) that is so sparingly used that one would be forgiven for thinking that Schaer had chosen to use none at all as a matter of policy. So when a delicate turn or appoggiatura appears – as it does to particularly appealing effect in the E major Third Partita – it lifts the music off its feet and into a dance in a way that is very striking. The strengths of this performance are all also its subtleties, in fact, and as such the light tone and tentative nature of some of its phrasing may not be for those with clear ideas of how they like their Bach solo violin music.

There are frequent points where Schaer’s intelligent tracking of the multifarious phrases within phrases of all these movements is so deliberate that it can interfere with the line to an extent just noticeable enough to undermine one’s confidence in the actual melody. That is not to say there is not enough scaffolding under either her tone or phrasing (which is more than enough to support the carding-out of the chords of the C major Third Sonata’s Adagio, for instance), but her very intellectual approach can occasionally tip into a presentation that is more mechanical than it is emotional. The Chaconne of the D minor Second Partita, then, as the most important movement of all these pieces, is unsurprisingly the most obvious casualty of this: the massiveness of its musical stature left the most conspicuously unfulfilled by a performance too ginger and tentative.