Founded in 2009 by Peter Harvey, the Magdalena Consort now make their first recording, of cantatas from three of Bach’s career stages, and there is still surprisingly little competition in the field given that The Essential Bach Choir, Andrew Parrott’s pathbreaking study, was published almost 15 years ago (Boydell: 2000). One such rival, however, is the London-based Bach Players, who recorded the two works made famous for their passacaglia movements, Nos 78 and 150. They are a true one-per-part ensemble, whereas the Magdalena Consort use a small string band (4 3 2 1 1), and the difference is immediately appreciable in the staggeringly ingenious opening chorus of No 78. Channel Classics’ engineers surround the voices with instruments, so that Elin Manahan Thomas’s soprano is not immediately distinguishable from the instrumental contributions to the cantus firmus, except by her vibrato, whereas Rachel Elliott and her choral colleagues have the space to inflect each word of this plea for rescue.

The four voices are fairly matched with each other, less so with their instrumental colleagues, and Harvey leads unfailingly elegant interpretations. At each turn, however, they yield to the textual and expressive detail of The Bach Players, who paint both the cedars and the soft breezes in the tiny trio of No 150, and then the shyly upturned gaze of the good Christian towards the Lord to a lulling accompaniment next heard at the end of the first part of Handel’s Solomon, 40 and more years later (Bach was all of 22 when he wrote BWV150), even if neither ensemble (or anyone else) attempts the extraordinary tone-painting of Gardiner’s second Bach Pilgrimage recording of this youthful wonder.

Back to our consort, and the slightly more straightforward Affekt of mature Bach in laudatory vein for No 147, which elicits a marvellously spirited, snap-reaction opening chorus, before James Gilchrist hymns Mary’s holy mouth with an almost unseemly sensuality. Compare the fluting church-tenor of Jeffrey Thomas in an uncharacteristically restrained recording by the grandaddy of Bach consort performance, Joshua Rifkin, and the concept of performance ‘progress’ doesn’t seem so hubristic after all.