this is a wonderful recital, carefully chosen and assembled, and beautifully played...there are movements highlighting the group’s fine oboists, bassoonists, violinists, trumpeters and, slightly less impressively, horn players. Their style is brisk and energised in the faster music and deeply expressive and spacious in the slower.

Although it might seem a strange idea to make a CD of the orchestral introductions to Bach’s cantatas, there is sufficient variety of mood – from celebratory to contemplative – to make the programme work as a sequence...the where-have-I-heard-that-before element is part of the disc’s attraction, and the superb Accademia Bizantina makes the music live and breathe.