Surprisingly, this pair of ‘oratorios’ has been coupled irregularly on record. Lobet Gott in seinen Reichen (the so-called Ascension Oratorio) was granted a BWV catalogue number, No 11, which has tended to align it more closely with the cantata oeuvre. But the truth is that each piece draws on the ‘dramma per musica’ model where the soloists act as protagonists in quasi-scenas or at least ruminate on the special nature of these high feast days. The Easter Oratorio is directly lifted from an earlier secular context, a lost birthday work from 1725 whose surviving text reveals a pastoral imagery deftly reconditioned by Bach for sacred purpose.

That BWV249 was not, at source, envisaged as Easter music matters little to Masaaki Suzuki in a more visceral reading than one might have expected, especially in the appropriately aerated introductory Sinfonia and choruses. The effect in the leavened surround-sound acoustic of the Kobe Shoin Chapel is certainly uplifting and even more striking in the outer movements of the Ascension Oratorio, where tuning (in the trumpets especially) and impact appear rather more cohesively managed in the thrillingly syncopated ritornelli of the final chorus.

Yet overall this latest Bach Collegium Japan release fails to sound quite special enough. There is something too calculatingly routine in the elegant but dangerously long (11’27”) aria of the Easter piece, ‘Seele, deine Spezereien’, where the admirable Yukari Nonoshita and flautist Liliko Maeda fail to sustain interest through a vital, mutating and spontaneous dialogue. The slumber aria, ‘Sanfte soll’, is at least flavoured with a sense of committed (but ultimately comforted) grief of the bereft disciple. The countertenor voice of Patrick van Goethem is disappointingly uninflected, tonally raw and simply not of the standard Suzuki usually employs.The Ascension Oratorio fares better overall but it has none of the shimmering beauty found in Herreweghe’s 1993 reading. Judging the purity of sentiment in the great continuo-less aria ‘Jesu, deine Gnadenblicke’ is a defining moment. Nonoshita is indeed radiant here but less valedictory than Barbara Schlick’s touching portrayal of Christ’s love as man’s lasting consolation.