All the music on this new SACD from the Netherlands Bach Society is associated with the festival of Christmas. Bach wrote the cantata Unser Mund sei voll Lachens for morning service on Christmas Day 1725, and the first version of the Magnificat for Christmas Day 1723, seven months after the Leipzig town council appointed him cantor of the Thomaskirche. It would hardly be exaggerating to say that Bach thus presented his visiting card to his new employer. According to the Bach scholar Christoph Wolff, the work is his, first really large-scale and complex piece of church music. Christmas was not the only occasion to sing the Magnificat text, however, for it was also a standard part of the vespers liturgy. This may explain why Bach made a second version, heard here, some years later. For this recording, in keeping with the tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jos van Veldhoven has interspersed Bach s Magnificat with other Christmas-themed music from the period.