The one disadvantage, albeit minor, of the gradual release of the Millennial Bach Cantata Pilgrimage has been the seemingly random order of the volumes’ appearance. Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s fresh, immediate and spontaneous diary has – until publication at least – to be stitched together from our memory of cantata performances in various heady locations. So, here we are in Genova, a week after those dazzling days in Potsdam and Wittenberg (but for us, actually, five years later), as we try to reimagine the troupe’s stage in the journey.

If the German volume was a treasure trove, these performances reward us with more variable riches. The Genoese leg is tautly unified around texts drawing on the gospel reading of the royal wedding feast. Out of the three cantatas, BWV49 and BWV180 have been most regularly coupled, if also for the pragmatic reasons of requiring a piccolo cello (many will recall Christophe Coin’s exquisite disc, on Astrée, from the organ loft of Ponitz in Thuringia, 2/95).

Like Coin, Gardiner spots the integrated features of portraying the soft and sensual love “themes” over these two works. The former presents a solo organ sinfonia (of what was to become the last movement of the E major Harpsichord Concerto for the Collegium Musicum), imaginatively and chirpily executed by Howard Moody, before a series of suitably alluring arias, toying with Song of Songs-inspired images of amorous beauty. Magdalena KoΩená, for all her class, is inconsistent and unsettled in “Ich bin herrlich” – which Gardiner amusingly spots as an early version of Bernstein’s “I feel pretty”. Her dialogues with the rooted and responsive Peter Harvey are rather hit-and-miss.

“Schmücke dich” (BWV180) is generally more satisfying but the problematic BWV162, a work reintroduced in Leipzig from a Weimar model, and with incomplete performing parts, is arguably the pick of the crop; Robert Levin’s reconstructed flute and oboe d’amore obbligatos furnish the aria, “Jesu, Brunnquell aller Gnaden”, with glades of fresh mint for the “fountain of all mercy”.

Genoa was clearly a remarkable event in the flesh, at which 4000 people were crammed into the cathedral. The Greenwich experience is, unsurprisingly, altogether more intimate. Despite rough edges, the structure of the nearly nine-minute opening of BWV109 is compellingly guided by Gardiner. This is followed by a clear prototype of “Ach, mein sinn” from the St John Passion, though more harrowing. Paul Agnew is a master of its characterisation.

If this is a virtually unknown Bach masterpiece, the same could be said for the last three cantatas. Their advocacy from our Bach “pilgrims” is most tellingly realised in BWV188, involving another Levin rescue job in the opening Sinfonia (this time from the third movement of the D minor Harpsichord Concerto). It’s the tenor aria that beguiles above all: a simple polonaise-like testament to the central place of trust. Again, Agnew is telling, and Bach’s distillation of its emblematic motif uncannily knowing.