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This kind of well-chosen and spirited reading lends intimacy, and can hold a concert audience enthralled. Is that all part of the plan?

'Yes, the readings are very important,' insists Sarah. 'They supply musical and historical context, and I think that's crucial for an audience. They help, in a very tangible way, to focus our listeners' minds on the period of the music we're playing. I think many of them find that a great help.'

Were the members of Phoenix Rising surprised, when researching the music separately and together, just how good the music of so many of Bach's contemporaries turned out to be?

'All of us knew Telemann wrote good music; not all of it, maybe -- he did turn out rather a lot -- but a great deal of it. Fasch, as we'd hoped, proved a real find. Graupner proved a bit more difficult to track down, partly because most of his available music tended to be bigger works; operas, concertos, and 'overtures' (orchestral suites). The canonic trio we programme is something of an exception.'

Joakim Olsson Kruse, Phoenix Rising's vital harpsichord player, has gained remarkable experience within just a few years. Before he came to Amsterdam he studied organ in Sweden and Church Music at the Gothenburg Music Academy, specialising in choir training, composition, keyboard and improvisation. Thereafter he studied Early Music on a Swedish Royal Music Bursary under Menno van Delft and Thérèse de Goede, and with Christophe Rousset in Paris, together with basso continuo studies for a master's degree at the Amsterdam Sweelinck Conservatory.

From 2002 -- the year he also made his début at the Slottheater Drottningholm, the haven of opera and dramatic Early Music performance near Stockholm, working with Christophe Rousset on performances of Handel's Tamerlano -- Joakim Olsson Kruse served as organist and conductor of the St Cecilia Choir at the Bonifatius (St Boniface) Church in nearby De Rijp, to the north of Amsterdam; before that (from 1999) he took up a post conducting and composing for the Swedish Choir at the Swedish Zeemanskerk (Seaman's Church) in Rotterdam. Olsson Kruse has done copious and substantial research into secular and sacred music of the Baroque period.

Ingrid Viñals Vilarnau, whose exquisitely executed playing of Bach's Suite No 1 in G for solo cello launched the second half of the 'Bach and his Competitors' programme, has completed her Postgraduate studies in Baroque cello under Wouter Möller at the Amsterdam conservatoire, having previously studied in Barcelona and at Zwolle in North-Central Holland. (For my money, Möller's guidance has worked a treat: there is a subtle elegance to Viñals' playing that can charm audiences into a stunned, hushed silence). She also studied modern cello. Back home she works extensively with the acclaimed Orquestra Barroca Catalana.

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