This album from L’Orfeo Barockorchester intriguingly does not name a director. Are we to assume that violinist Michi Gaigg, their founder, is directing from the seat (and conducting for the movements without violin)? Or perhaps the two vocal soloists, Margot Oitzinger and Peter Kooij, both extremely fine Bach interpreters, took on an additional role? Perhaps Gaigg’s vision was for these performances more to resemble chamber music. Unfortunately, there is a lack of strong artistic vision, and given that the album features some of Bach’s most famous cantatas, this is sorely felt.

Sadly, Kooij is not in his best voice either. In the opening aria of Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen (No 56), for example, many ends of musical sentences lack substance. While his pronunciation of final consonants is exceptional, it is audible that Kooij has not left quite enough in the tank, and in the long chromatic passagework (especially 2'49" onwards), the overall effect is that he is struggling. The following movement, one of Bach’s most wondrous recitatives, tells a similar story. Compare the breathless ends of phrases with his round and resplendent voice in his recording with Masaaki Suzuki and Bach Collegium Japan (BIS, 5/09). Yet there is something moving about this recent performance. Kooij is less rhetorically obvious and more quietly colourful; it stirs the soul.

At 70 years old, Kooij is clearly no longer in his vocal prime, but there are bountiful moments where his immense experience shines through. His interpretation of Bach’s famous slumber aria from Cantata No 82 is remarkably shaped, and the libretto (‘Rest now, my weary eyes’) fuses with a rhetoric wrinkled with decades of familiarity. It’s a powerfully subtle characterisation of Simeon.

Oitzinger for the most part fares well, and is occasionally superb. Bach gave his solo alto singers extremely good music to sing, exemplified here by the heart-stoppingly good ‘Stirb in mir’ from Gott soll allein mein Herze haben (No 169). Though the performance is a couple of clicks too fast for my liking, Oitzinger and L’Orfeo Barockorchester excellently capture an atmosphere of distraught emptiness (though, admittedly, there is something enjoyably sinister with the sicilienne taken this fast).

Organist Jan Jansen, whose solos are peppered throughout the two discs, is very good. In the second movement of Geist und Seele wird verwirret (No 35), the balance against Oitzinger is just a bit too easy: there should be something unsettlingly crowded about the texture when the basso continuo drops out. I’m desperate for more organ in these moments, both to make sense of the strange rhetoric and for the necessary friction with Oitzinger. The translations used by CPO are from 1942 and thus frustratingly reflect outdated Bach scholarship.