Bach: Complete Flute Sonatas: Pahud/Pinnock

Bach's flute sonatas are a musicological minefield; disputes still rage about which are the great man's own work and which might have infiltrated the canon from other sources. Emmanuel Pahud opts for inclusivity: there are eight works here, including a sonata in G for two flutes that is an early incarnation of what became a viola da gamba sonata, though the more dubious works are consigned to the second disc. The finest music - in the two sonatas with obbligato harpsichord in B minor and A major, and in two with continuo alone, in E minor and E major - is top-drawer Bach, probably composed in the 1730s, teeming with melodic invention designed to put the newly fashionable instrument through its paces. The performances with Trevor Pinnock as harpsichordist, though, won't be to all tastes. Pahud is principal flute of the Berlin Philharmonic, and his larger than life playing here is the equivalent of that orchestra playing a Brandenburg concerto - magnificent in its way, but not quite how Bach would have imagined it.