These three cantatas have long been in the canon as celebrated examples of Bach in the first flush of Leipzig creativity – from 1723 to 1726, before he realised that his talents were better employed in compositional ambitions that didn’t involve clerics. Jesu, der du meine Seele is one of the most glittering achievements of the period, and Guillon marshals his responsive one-to-a-part Le Banquet Céleste, luminously capturing the bittersweet of Christ’s death in the exquisitely refined opening passacaglia. Attention to rhetorical detail and harmonic coloration are extended to one of Bach’s most delectable duets, ‘Wir eilen’, which finds the same conceit of joyful discipleship that Teresa Stich-Randall and Dagmar Hermann so gloriously conveyed for Felix Prohaska in 1954 (Bach Guild, 1/60).

In stark contrast is a highly dramatic reading of O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort (‘O Eternity, O thunderous word’), described by Bach as a ‘Dialogue between Fear and Hope’. The sense of oratorian ‘scena’ is sustained with graphic intensity by Guillon’s wonderfully febrile and imperilled projection of the allegorical Fear, answered by Thomas Hobbs’s assuaging hopes of redemption. It’s the perfect pairing in a cantata whose sense can easily be lost without an unerring thread of Sturm und Drang. Among the interpolating organ solos, stylishly played by Maude Gratton, the immediate launch of the C minor Prelude (sans fugue) ensures that we are still tied in emotional knots.

The real relevance of this movement, though, is that the main theme of the opening chorus of Cantata No 47 is in direct quotation. Again, this is a work where Bach takes no prisoners; it is replete with demonstrative gesture, aching dissonance and a mesmerisingly unsettling obbligato organ in the soprano aria ‘Wer ein wahrer Christ’, sung with a suitably unyielding tone by Céline Scheen. Sparkling imagination, insistent characterisation and a satisfyingly resonant ensemble mark this out as an exceptional and original release.