This was was originally intended to be Volume 3 of Reinhard Goebel’s ‘Bachiana’ series, but Kozená’s central role in it must have been too good an opportunity for DG’s marketing department to miss. The title derives from JC Bach’s Ach, das ich Wassers g’nug hätte (which Goebel recorded before, with countertenor David Cordier, Archiv, 2/87). Kozená brings womanly tenderness rather than the ethereal spirituality that distinguishes several gorgeous countertenor recordings (Gérard Lesne, Daniel Taylor and Andreas Scholl, among others). Compared to the sublime understatement evident in 1986, it’s a pity that Goebel now prefers to provide a spiky violin line that shows remarkably scant sympathy.

There’s a sense of Goebel being unpredictable for its own sake, and nowhere is this more destructive and charmless than in JS Bach’s Vergnügte Ruh’. His iconoclastic interpretation of the sublime first movement is an uncomfortable miscalculation, while the profound concept of ‘contented rest’ is rejected in favour of a frenzied turn at the Munich beer festival. Goebel shows a poor understanding for the text and it is strange to hear such hypertension misapplied to one of Bach’s gentlest and most tender creations. It is not an experience I will care to repeat often.

Kozená is better served by Conti’s Languet anima mea. Conti was an esteemed opera composer and theorbo player at the imperial court in Vienna, and JS Bach admired this operatic motet enough to copy and perform it himself. Kozená’s declamatory performance is thrilling, and Goebel’s punchy style works better here, although I prefer the more elegant and natural performance recorded by Sibylla Rubens and Thomas Hengelbrock in 2002. Kozená and Goebel rarely relax and allow the music to breathe.

Ironically, the qualities of emotive effect and graceful accompaniment lacking in so much of this programme are sufficient in attractive pieces by CPE and JCF Bach that are lively, lyrical, and full of fascinating gallant leanings. They do not compensate for the harshness elsewhere, but at least they offer something rewarding from a disc that should have offered much more.