With just one or two to a part, each musician is a leader here. The purity of the singers’ straight tones and the immediacy and depth of their individual reactions to lexical meaning are bracing, yet held within a delicately balanced ensemble...Hats off to Les Arts Florissants for daring to make Bach a man of the theatre.

These are beautiful, text-centred performances, and while I find several movements too fast for my taste, they are always engaging. There are some extraordinarily good solos throughout, and I keenly anticipate the next volume.

For a while there was a school of thought that held that the faster you performed early music, the more authentic you were being, and having heard that opening - impressively agile and nimble though it is - I did wonder whether this performance [of Christ Lag in Todes Banden] would fall prey to the same thinking. Far from it; indeed there are hints of nostalgia for an era of performances that made up in heart what they lacked in scholarship.

it wasn’t the concept that knocked me sideways as much as the dynamic effect of the group’s stylistic choices...Number of participants? Very modest: eight singers at most, with fifteen instrumentalists, a mix resulting in evenly balanced textures that clarify every line of Bach’s counterpoint, and a refreshing community spirit.