A far cry from the sombre and disillusioned collaborations between the Thomaners and the Gewandhaus Orchestra in the post-war years, this recording from Maundy Thursday and Good Friday of 2012 at St Thomas’s presents a relatively contented era of municipal Bach performance. Exactly how one defines musical ‘tradition’ in the context of Leipzig since Bach’s death is a thorny subject but, judging by this latest chapter, it’s now a matter of how ‘period’ manners and inflections dominate over the sluggish swathes heard in the St Matthews of Kurt Thomas and Erhard Mauresburger.

Indeed, the opening frames of the work skittle forth with clear textures, unforced choral interjections and the élan of an especially agile German all-boys’ choir. Likewise, the orchestra is entirely at home in Georg Christoph Biller’s exacting gestural landscape (encapsulated perfectly in ‘Blute nur’), effortlessly extended from their youthful modern-instrument Baroque forays under Riccardo Chailly.

The unostentatious filming resonates with Biller’s uncomplicated and, some might say, fairly unexceptional interpretation. An impressive evolution of the narrative is achieved largely by a judicious choice of tempi and the ringing reportage of Wolfram Lattke, a solid if not especially poetic Evangelist (and one of three soloists who are alumni of the choir). Klaus Mertens is a seasoned and eloquent Christus, the pick of the crop, but with soprano Christina Landshamer also delivering consistently well, most notably in ‘Aus Liebe’. There is much else to admire in this production, in toto, with its coherent audio and visual values – refreshingly un-iconic in avoiding Bach’s burial place every other shot.

The least durable aspect is the shortage of penetrating musical insights and gut-wrenching human response that define the great interpretations of the last 70 years. Each listener has his moments of defining importance: ‘So ist mein Jesus nun gefangen’ near the end of Part 1 is such a place for me, where metaphysical allusions invite musicians to find ways of transporting us. This is a reading which confirms a strong identity with Bach and the new Leipzig ‘way’ of performing his music but keeps within fairly geometric emotional bounds. For all the new-found surface health in Leipzig collaboration, revelations of the Great Passion are thin on the ground here.