Hubert Parry termed it “the mightiest choral work ever written” and other commentators have gone even further, with Hans Nageli hailing Bach’s Mass in B Minor as “the greatest artwork of all times and all people”. Since its inclusion into the musical canon this epic mass setting has become something of a touchstone for ensembles – a fixed point to which all inevitably return, a sort of musical and spiritual Greenwich Mean Time.

The Oxford Bach Choir have a long history with the work, and Saturday night marked their 30th performance. They were joined by the London Mozart Players under the pulsingly energetic direction of Nicholas Cleobury, and it was a combined force of several hundred musicians who guided a full audience through Bach’s two hour musical pilgrimage.

There is no orchestral introduction to the Mass, no refractory period for the rustling of cough-sweets and composing of the listening mind into an appropriately meditative state; the opening invocation ‘Lord have mercy’, set for full choir and strings, crashes straight into the silence – an impact shocking even on the umpteenth hearing. Sung off-book, with all eyes up, it here had an immediacy and focus that physically matched the musical drama, compelling audience attention without feeling fussily choreographed.

Bach’s intricate counterpoint is as challenging mentally as it is technically, and the choir acquitted themselves more than honourably. Of particular joy were the faster rhythmic movements such as the ‘Et Resurrexit’ where Cleobury’s exuberant relish was visibly shared among all the singers, with the tenor section claiming the evening’s vocal laurels with their gutsy and courageous rendition of the fiendishly exposed ‘et iterum venturus est’ section – a bold approach their somewhat more timid (if reliably tuneful) soprano colleagues could do well to emulate.

Among the soloists it was soprano Ffur Wyn who shone, growing from a quietly lyrical start to fuller and more expansive drama in the latter movements, and providing a particularly pleasing vocal foil to Christopher Gillett’s forthright tenor in the Domine Deus.

Bach’s B Minor Mass can mean many different things: the matter-of-fact detachment of period performance or the virtuosity of single-voice renderings. The full-blooded approach of the English choral society is another traditional interpretation, and when performed with as much stylish commitment as Oxford’s Bach Choir demonstrated I defy even the most rigid of purists to leave unsatisfied.