Even after the completion of the highly praised Bach cantata series, which was released between 2004 and 2014, and in which La Petite Bande recorded cantatas for every Sunday of the liturgical year, Sigiswald Kuijken still does not let go of his great passion for Johann Sebastian Bach. He turns once again to the cantatas and presents on his new recording three works that Bach wrote for the end of January and the beginning of February, and that he performed in Leipzig at St Thomas' Church between 1725 and 1729.

Here is the start of a great adventure: the complete recording of the five books of pièces de viole of Marin Marais. The First Book, published in 1686, contains a dozen suites, two of which are scored for two bass viols and continuo. It also features a very moving Tombeau for ‘Monsieur Méliton’, probably one of Marais’s teachers, and a set of variations on a theme given to the composer by an ‘estranger’, which foreshadows one of the principal compositions of his Second Book, the Couplets des Folies d’Espagne.

'Herzens-Lieder' [Songs of the Heart] – this title would certainly have appealed to the two librettists and four composers featured upon this CD. In terms of music and church history, they all – Johann Kuhnau, Georg Philipp Telemann, Christoph Graupner and Johann Sebastian Bach – form part of the Lutheran church choir tradition.