On their first album under new director Edzard Burchards, the Rheinische Kantorei chart more than a century and a half of sacred motets written for St. Thomas, Leipzig — one of Germany's most prestigious musical posts. The programme runs from Tobias Michael, who took up the cantorate in 1631 amid the ruins of the Thirty Years' War, through Sebastian Knüpfer, Johann Schelle and Werner Fabricius, to Johann Sebastian Bach and the composers who followed him: Doles, Bach's pupil Krebs, and Johann Adam Hiller, who assumed the post in the year of the French Revolution. It opens with the double-choir pasticcio Jauchzet dem Herrn, alle Welt, whose lively outer sections most likely stem from Bach's friend Georg Philipp Telemann. Despite the often austere, existential texts, the singing is luminous and life-affirming — a school of love and devotion with faith at its heart. The choir's slender, radiant voices and immaculate intonation place them among the leading interpreters of early music.