After mix-and-match concept albums from Hélène Grimaud grandly called Credo and Reflection, the French pianist who thinks a lot and dances with wolves lets us off lightly with one simply titled Bach. Yet her itch to programme cleverly remains, and to a degree brings fascinating results.

She’s playing Bach, but Bach seen through a shifting prism. The “pure” Bach of The Well-Tempered Clavier is infiltrated with Bach seen through 19th and early 20th-century eyes, in transcriptions by Liszt, Busoni and Rachmaninov, with one by Bach himself (the first keyboard concerto, originally for violin) thrown in.

Her programme pattern doesn’t end there. Each modern transcription included shares the same key as its preceding neighbour from The Well-Tempered Clavier, in D minor, A minor, and C minor. The results underline the modern transcriber’s changed perspective as much as the music’s family resemblance: the contrasts and continuities are yoked most strikingly in Busoni’s romantic take on the epic chaconne from the second Violin Partita, placed at the recital’s heart.

Of course, Grimaud’s “pure” Bach isn’t all that pure. For one thing, she’s playing on a modern piano, not Bach’s harpsichord. She’s also playing in the post-Glenn Gould world of crisp, dry fingering and the engineering of tenderness by sudden pianissimos at the pieces’ close. Easily lured by self-indulgence, Grimaud sometimes becomes a hurtling machine: breathtaking to experience initially, but doubtfully nourishing in the long term.

Yet she can also be tenderly poetic. And the album contains only one thundering mistake, the first piano concerto – another work in her beloved D minor. Finding a concerto thrust at you after four solo tracks is disruptive enough. The sound balance presents another problem, with the strings of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen scratching distantly in Grimaud’s shadow. The concerto’s textural interplay is lost; Grimaud’s clarity takes a knock too. You may want to skip this entirely.

(Deutsche Grammophon, TS £12.99, call 0845 6026328)

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