Followers of this, the only remaining in-progress cantata series, will recall Sigiswald Kuijken’s strategy of selecting a single cantata for every Sunday and Feast Day, instead of the ubiquitous completist approach. Dogged individuality and historical consciousness (of a certain kind) have driven the performance practices adopted – notably in one-to-a-part choruses and forensic instrumental scrutiny. All this has, at best, amounted to recordings brimming with originality, rhetorical conviction and textural refinement. Bach’s reworking of an Advent cantata from Weimar, with his choice librettist Salomo Franck, was transformed in summer 1723 into the bipartite and assuaging masterpiece Ärgre dich, o Seele, nicht (‘Fret not, my soul’), delivered here with telling vocal élan (not all the vocal contributions have been distinguished in the series), notably in beautifully blended chorus work. Of the arias, the liberating joy of the enveloping duet ‘Lass, Seele’, with the deft interlocking exchanges between Siri Thornhill and Petra Noskaiová, is the highlight.

If Kuijken has tended to choose works of elliptical, even elusive qualities, such is not the case in his selecting the streamlined and graphic admonishments of the Trinity work, No 168, or the joyful Easter cantata, No 134, both afforded readings of considerable personality. From the latter, ‘Auf, Gläubige’ – one of Bach’s most elevatingly balletic tenor arias – is as engagingly sung here by Christoph Genz as it is touchingly by Kurt Equiluz for Winschermann (Philips – nla).

The incremental dance forms in this enriching work remind one of its secular provenance as much as the solo alto cantata, Widerstehe doch der Sünde, evokes an older devotional tradition with its expressive five-part string texture. This is some way short of a classic reading, not least because of some poor intonation from Noskaiová and strings (otherwise often stunning), and a shortage of luminosity which has one running for Alfred Deller from 1954 (Vanguard, 4/56, 1/95). This performance aside, a very fine new addition to the series.