Michael Steinberg is surely correct when he writes in his booklet note that Bach’s cantatas ‘are sermons in verse and music, beautiful and intense supplements to the sermons preached by the pastor in his pulpit’. But Lorraine Hunt Lieberson’s performances of the two cantatas on this new Nonesuch disc don’t seem like sermons at all. They’re more like confessionals and deeply personal, supplicatory ones at that. Nor would I say that her interpretations have a ‘contemplative nobility’, Jonathan Freeman- Attwood’s apt description of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s classic 1957 recording of No 199, as that phrase suggests a kind of beatific separation of body and soul – a surmounting of earthly suffering – that’s missing here. Perhaps Lieberson might be more profitably compared with Janet Baker. The American mezzo-soprano has a similarly dark and well-focused sound, though it’s slightly less reedy, and in No 82, both singers vividly portray souls wracked by intense feelings of guilt (though, thankfully, without any verismo-style chest-thumping or breathlessness). But, in terms of bringing words and music to life through a wealth of imaginative detail, Lieberson surpasses even Baker.

Listen, for a straightforward example, to the way Lieberson lightens her tone on the word ‘Freuden’ in the opening aria of Ich habe genug. Or, for a more subtle example, to her softening of the final line in the first recitative, gently easing the listener into the lullaby-like strains of ‘Schlummert ein’. In the final aria of No 82, which Baker dispatches with joyful severity, Lieberson conveys an almost schizoid mixture of hopefulness and anguish that comes closer to the text’s true meaning (which says, in essence: ‘I’ll find joy in death; If only I could die now’). Throughout No 199, too, Lieberson is intensely expressive. Note the snarl of self-loathing at the word ‘Adamssamen’ in the opening recitative, or the way she covers her sound, almost as if she were humming, at the line ‘Weil der Mund geschlossen ist’ (‘For my mouth is shut’), in the aria ‘Stumme Seufzer, stille Klagen’.

The Orchestra of Emmanuel Music (a Boston-based church that incorporates the Bach cantata cycle into its regular liturgy, and where Lieberson once played viola) provides warm-hearted, rich-toned support from eleven strings plus bassoon, and Peggy Pearson shapes the obbligato oboe d’amore parts with exquisite sensitivity. A stunning and remarkably affecting achievement all around.