These cantatas date from Bach’s brief tenure as organist in Muhlhausen (1707-08) when the composer was barely in his 20s. Remarkable for their individuality, each of the four works is conceived on the foundations of past traditions alongside current conventions which the young Bach had assimilated into his creative repository since birth. The Purcell Quartet and their distinguished single-voice ‘chorus’ simply and refreshingly take as they find by relishing the intimate and heart-warming potential of reflective devotion which Christ lag in Todesbanden and Gottes Zeit (or Actus tragicus), the two best-known works here, offer.

Throughout, the mixed group of singers and instrumentalists provide a lightness of touch where others might sink into despondent purplish textures. There is certainly less of the smouldering rhetoric of the rich palette of Continental ensembles and yet rarely has the stark trajectory from loneliness to hope been so intimately realised in Christ lag – Bach’s first real masterpiece. Peter Harvey under-characterises the theatricality of verse 6 (‘the night of sin is vanished’ is far too safe) but there are few other missed opportunities here.

The line is ‘led’ by Emma Kirkby (though leadership is perhaps not a straight-forward concept in this cohesive ensemble genre). Hers may not be a timbre one associates readily with Bach – whatever that can mean – but this is a performance of great musical versatility, a prima inter pares, who shifts her lyrical instincts readily from contemplative yearning to joyous extroversion. The distinctive Michael Chance has a tendency to stick out uncomfortably in one-to-a-part the ensembles but he makes a poignant contribution in his duet with Kirkby in No 4, if rather less so in Actus tragicus, altogether the least potently realised of the cantatas.

Whilst the austere Aus der Tiefen settles less well than the others (the imploring quality of Philippe Herreweghe’s collective forces adds up to rather more), this is still a telling account which exudes independent thinking, captured in the heavily-imaged solo oboe in ‘So du willt’ where Anthony Robson splendidly interpolates and encircles the vocal lines with a life-force (and life-line) of God-given salvation. Charles Daniels’s sensitive supplication, ‘Meele seele’, from the same work is evocatively under-pinned by Robert Woolley’s fine organ realisation. The succinct No 196 caps an excellent opening disc in this mini-series with its beautifully languid opening Sinfonia and glorious peroration. Evidence more of a genius made than in the making.