With historically informed performance practice seemingly flavour of the month, it’s perhaps surprising that a new group has identified a gap in the market, but that is just what violinist Madeleine Easton has done with her shiny new Bach Akademie Australia. We can boast fine Classical and Romantic ensembles in the Australian Haydn Ensemble and ARCO, the splendid Orchestra of the Antipodes seems to play exclusively for Pinchgut’s operatic ventures, and with the ABO spreading its net wide, Bach comes up as a rarity rather than a regular. Good for Easton then, an Australian who has made her career abroad regularly leading Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s English Baroque Soloists. And good for Gardiner who has signed on as BAA’s Patron.

Of course, Bach has left us a great deal of music, but although the Passions attract annual attention, there’s relatively little in the orchestral line to fill a concert programme. No, it’s the liturgical cantatas that remain under-performed – perhaps unfamiliar because there are well over 200 of them – but as anyone will know who has gone on his musical pilgrimage through the ecclesiastical calendar, this was Bach’s real laboratory, the stuff that brought out the inventor in the...