One of the most fascinating of Bach’s contemporaries was the Bohemian Jan Dismas Zelenka, who worked in Dresden for many years. His instrumental music is quirky and inventive, his church music rather less adventurous. But this newly restored Mass and Litany for St Francis Xavier are exuberant works: the Mass an extrovert sequence of arias and choruses with trumpets and drums, the Litany with braying horns. The Mass turned up in the Berlin Sing-Akademie archive, which also contained works of the Bach family; conductor Václav Luks has restored it and his group perform it splendidly. The Xaverian Litany is a Dresden speciality with an oddly unresolved ending.
