Bach knew a good thing when he heard it and Georg Böhm was one such figure whom we know received his imprimatur. Based in Luneburg (where Bach was, to all intents and purposes, a sixth-former at St Michael’s School), Böhm had mastered the flamboyant keyboard styles prevalent in northern Germany while taking a particular interest in how French keyboard sensibility and technique of the mid-to-late 17th century could be adapted for the high emotional stakes beloved of Germans. These discs are, above all, a celebration of sonority; one notices this in Böhm’s splendid organ music also, where his command of the textural impact of strong harmonic movement has as much to offer as the actual progressions themselves.

Mitzi Meyerson brings considerable colour and suavity to these 11 Suites and the miscellaneous ‘triptych’ piece, the very original ‘scena’, Prelude, Fugue and Postlude (which Schumann described as an ‘eerie caprice’). Playing on a highly responsive and lyrical 1998 double-manual harpsichord by Keith Hill, Meyerson homes in on the essential affekt of each prelude and treads a fine line between when the specific dance is to be articulated and when it is plainly a servant to another expressive end. The D minor Suite No 4 is a splendidly cohesive work and she allows the style brisé to focus intently around the world of its own creation (I’m sure that this element of sustained invention was what riveted Bach). The initial F minor work, which contains a deft chaconne, really is a masterpiece and well characterised here.

Meyerson is especially successful in the movements requiring incisive execution and portentous nobility, as heard in the F major suite (No 7) and the grandiloquent D major work (No 2) with its fine and original French Overture and celebratory quasi-orchestral movements. Again, she claims that a kind of ‘nebulous’ quality exists in this music: Rinaldo Alessandrini is less equivocal and in the delectable F major Suite he delivers a far more brooding intensity and generosity of sound.

I wondered also whether the title ‘Genius of the bizarre’ was really that apt. Böhm may employ occasional chromatic inflections to inform his melodic style but here is a composer whose taut musical landscape is arresting at a fundamental level – because he is always in control of the music’s destiny. Despite the inappropriate strap-line in the booklet, Meyerson is far from gratuitously histrionic; if anything she tends to be a touch uninvolved when temperament could kick in. However, she does Böhm a great service here and reminds us why Bach justly rated him in the top division of senior contemporaries.