After a busy Easter in Leipzig in 1724, Bach’s May was no less productive, even though his scoring was proportionally downsized from the great Paschal festivities. None of these cantatas perhaps rank as among Bach’s most highly wrought and unified masterpieces, but the composer fulfilled his obligations with some timely revisiting of previous creations from his time at Cöthen. This enabled him to rekindle the possibilities of duet writing as a central focus in the absence of large choral forces. Cantata No 184 contains a particularly expansive example for soprano and alto (‘Gesegnete Christen’) where the ritornello’s dance character is lifted by intricate instrumental filigree, executed with considerable panache by Bach Collegium Japan. The two home-grown soloists make an agreeable and well-balanced team, and the soprano, Yukari Nonoshita joins the bass, Peter Kooij, in the gavotte-like final movement, but performed here with no more than a perfunctory efficiency.

Cantata No 173, written to be performed the day after the Pentecost celebration, is a sister-work to 184 as both a secular parody (here, as a birthday ‘serenada’ for Prince Leopold in Cöthen) and in its summary attention to words, as texts are freely interchanged. The duet here makes a perfect strophic fit, from ‘beneath the hem of his (Leopold’s) red robe’, in its original, to ‘God so loved the World’: this is a catchy, if undemanding movement.

If Masaaki Suzuki’s musicians present avery respectable series of performances in these two paired works, it is not surprising that the commitment and sense of corporate response increases in the uplifting duet for soprano and bass which opens Cantata No 59. This is a concentrated choral fugue which sees Bach return to a work which he may have kept up his sleeve from his first weeks in Leipzig in 1723. Accompanied by gloriously interleaving trumpets and strings, the skilful counterpoint is almost passed off as workaday by Bach. It is anything but, and Suzuki raises the profile with a fervour that is lacking with Ton Koopman, despite the expert attentions of Ruth Ziesak and Klaus Mertens. The same cannot be said for the concluding aria where, although Kooij deftly imparts a plausible view of paradise, a cloying violin obbligato and the otherwise luminous acoustic of the Kobe Shoin Women’s University Chapel seems to blur the message.

With a decent reading of Cantata No 44 (although Nonoshita hardly rivals Barbara Schlick, under Philippe Herreweghe, in the great ‘Es ist und bleibt’ aria), this is a more than worthy addition to the series which it must be said – and it’s all relative – contains only intermittently front-rank Bach.