Normal service resumes in Ton Koopman’s ambitious series of complete Bach cantatas. Volume 13 is the first under the Challenge Classics label after the Erato debacle in which all bets were called off for the conclusion of the project. And where better to re-launch than within Bach’s second cycle of cantatas from the prolific period in 1724-25?

This volume contains some magnificent chorale-based works including Wie schon leuchtet der Morgenstern, a radiant cantata based on Philip Nicolai’s famous hymn in which Bach seemed acutely aware of the unusual doubling-up of the Feast of the Annunciation and Palm Sunday, as happened in 1725. Koopman presents a glowingly festive and prescient account of the opening chorale-fantasia which foretells the birth of Christ and the journey of the Three Kings. The instrumentation of horns and oboes da caccia conveys both the feeling of ceremonial and the vulnerability of the unknown which also pervades Cantata No 65, Sie werden aus Saba (recorded in Suzuki’s recent Volume 21, BIS 7/03), in that case setting off across the fields for Bethlehem. Koopman can boast outstanding horn playing and some alluring concertante work from the violins. One could quibble both here, and in No 62 (the less well-known Komm der Heiden Heiland which Gardiner performs peerlessly) that the chorus lacks the injection of physical accentuation to convey the incandescence of both texts which, in the case of Wie schön, is communicated with both supreme vitality and touching humility in the atmospheric account of Fritz Lehmann from 1952 (nla).

All these works contain aria writing of the most vivid and lyrical kind; it’s almost as if Bach deliberately contrasts the new formal principles of his taut choruses with a concept of super-refined melisma. It certainly places great responsibility on the shoulders of the singers who, it must be said, have only intermittently risen to the challenges over the series. Sopranos have come and gone (although Sylvia Rubens, it is hoped, has not disappeared altogether) and Deborah York takes her chance with performances of technical elan, perception and glistening clarity, as in her centre-piece aria in No 92, though not always an expanded sense of what the possibilities are. If only Koopman showed more interest in his soloists. Too often, one senses that there has been a minimal investigation of what singers can truly impart in Bach, posterity left with a kind of work- in-progress document. Paul Agnew has contributed a great deal of finely turned and sensitive portrayals for Koopman over the years – he always knows exactly what he is singing about – and here, he disappoints only in unyielding timbre and a tendency to bulge when working around vowel sounds which don’t always beautify the line. He is not helped in ‘Man halte’ from No 93 by the ponderous tempo (here, Herreweghe’s Howard Crook is the answer). Yet Agnew’s soft-grained ‘Ach, ziehe die Seele’ from No 96, with the exceptional flautist Wilbert Hazelzet, is a highlight of the disc with its committed declamation, underpinned by supreme continuo playing.

Of the many outstanding cantatas which Bachians should know, two works from the third disc, Nos 133 and 92, are especially fine and both are persuasively realised. Ich freue mich in dir (No 133) is an urgent and brilliantly-conceived Christmas cantata with a breathtak- ingly energetic opening ‘concerto-chorus’ built around an incisive chorale, which Koopman exclaims with the visceral immediacy to render Gardiner a slouch by comparison. The arias are amongst Bach’s most refined, as they are in No 92, a Septuagesima piece which retains the majority of strophes from the original hymn in a chorale-cantata of extraordinary contemplative breadth. Returning to Leonhardt, one is reminded that his series with Harnoncourt was not just a blue-skies adventure; his recording of this work has a maturity and composure which is all-too-rare these days. Still, Koopman’s new volume is nothing if not genuinely committed to parading Bach’s finest with brilliance and colour, if not always within a sustained emotional climate.