The mystique of the ‘Vor Bach’ generations has intensified in the last 30 years, from the early recorded forays of Musica Antiqua Köln and others towards a greater refinement of the importance of Johann Sebastian’s family to his emerging development and identity. Recent manuscript discoveries would also suggest that early Bachs were performed into the early 19th century, not least by the Singakademie Berlin.

The three characters celebrated in this deeply felt and atmospheric compendium of the complete Bach family motets
before JSB are Johann Bach and the two brothers Johann Christoph and Johann Michael, respectively the composer’s great uncle and first-cousin-once-removed (Michael was also Bach’s father-in-law). The former represents the earliest surviving music by a Bach, characterised by a blend of strophic hymnody of devotional Lutheran soulfulness peppered with cautious Italian conceits and fairly austere antiphony.

It’s the music of Johann Christoph that truly captures the imagination. Even if Johann Sebastian had died in a plague, this JCB – described in Bach’s Obituary as ‘as good at inventing beautiful thoughts as he was at expressing words’ – would still have taken his place as an exceptional figure in the crevice between Schütz and Buxtehude. Vox Luminis relish in Der Gerechte the richness of textual illustration and the arches of elegant scoring: a simultaneous delight in the forensic and abstract delights of five-part motet-writing in which the devices of Bach’s own motets spring from the page. Just listen to the doleful imitative sequences of Fürchte dich mich!

Strong harmonic flavours abound too in the thoughtful if more conventional works of Johann Michael. On initial acquaintance, he may exhibit less of the fluency and expressive range of his elder brother but the sureness of sentiment in Ich weiss dass mein Erlöser lebt (‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’), the directional vigour and polychoral majesty of the eight-part motets, and the chewy textures of Das Blut Jesu Christi, with the outstanding cornets and sackbuts of Scorpio Collectief, reveal another master of his genre.

Vox Luminis gravitate easily to the contemplative, never over-projecting the dramatic implications of the texts, although for those who prefer the more overt gestures of the Monteverdi Choir, these performances can appear prosaic and vocally inconsistent, especially in the occasional ‘longueurs’ where homophony outstays its welcome and where flatness in the upper line can dull the musical line (as in Mit Weinen). Even so, this varied repository of motets contains many small wonders, reinforcing our growing sense that Johann Sebastian had a mentor-in-chief in Johann Christoph, whose influence is incalculable. Es ist nun aus – a deeply touching devotional aria with each verse ending with ‘Welt, gute nacht’ – is worth the price of the discs alone.