Mark Seow

It’s low-hanging fruit, but perfectly ripe for the picking: this album from The Breathtaking Collective is breathtaking. Figuratively, but also quite literally as the fabulous cornett-playing from Bruce Dickey and Lambert Colson streaks through the choral texture. The bellows of organist Kris Verhelst generously boost the aerated mix; listen to the four-voice canzon La Scabrosa for his tinglingly bright solo injection, enjoyably wobbly in agogic.

Anyone following Mahan Esfahani’s Hyperion survey of Bach’s keyboard works will know that each instalment brings a secondary pleasure: discovering which of the sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt’s contorted heads has been recruited for the album cover art. But for ‘The Complete Keyboard Concertos’ – which comprises more than you might expect – we get the face of Esfahani himself. Caught in a double facepalm, is this exasperation at completing the eight-bar or so fragment BWV1059?

In James R Scobie’s foundational book Argentina: A City and a Nation (1964), he writes how ‘to step from cosmopolitan Buenos Aires into remote Salta or Jujuy was to move backward a hundred years … This was the city that by 1910 even Parisians would claim as the Paris of South America after a Cinderella-like transformation’.