Fresh from the high-wire and high jinks of John Eliot Gardiner’s riveting and penetrating account of the Motets comes a calmer and more contained view. The St Jacobs Chamber Choir of Stockholm and REbaroque make for easy collaborators, the latter as rich colla parte instrumental accompanists to these unique Bachian choral essays in rhetorical intimacy and contrapuntal declamation. Gary Graden directs an almost identical programme to the Monteverdi Choir, although he includes the highly wrought funeral motet O Jesu Christ, mein’s Lebens Licht as well as the standard six and Ich lasse dich nicht – a recent addition to the oeuvre on account of its authorship shifting from an elderly cousin (Johann Christoph) to Johann Sebastian. As it happens, neither performance represents the best of Graden’s Bachian credentials: timid violin-playing in the former and perfunctoriness in the latter mask the deeper reflective content.

Quite a different landscape emerges in the other performances, where Graden’s forces deliver a consistently well-inflected understanding of the music. The concerted double-choir movements are presented within a warm and spacious acoustic while the chorale movements – both hymns and paraphrases – each inhabit a kind of corporate homecoming. If there is a temptation to generic jauntiness (the first section of Fürchte dich nicht is just too powdery), Graden communicates the essence of the text without fuss and this reaps rewards in a wonderfully smooth-grained and sensitive Jesu meine Freude. Logic and balance prevail over surprise and passion in most of these readings.

If the singing here isn’t quite in the Monteverdi league and the performances are occasionally undercooked rhetorically, this is still an excellent version for those who seek in the Motets a clear, well-lit and equable path to the heart of Bach’s personal and transcendental visions of devotion, death and salvation.