It certainly makes a change from a throat lozenge. "Chocolate please," whispered a member of the Oxford Bach Choir to his companion in the audience just before the Choir began its performance of Rachmaninov's All-Night Vigil. As the singer involved was a bass, no doubt the chocolate was necessary to produce a full-bodied performance the Vigil (often subtitled the Vespers) contains some notoriously low notes for the bass department.

"Come, let us worship God," begins the first of the 15 choral movements that make up the Vigil. Right from the start, Rachmaninov's setting plays to one of the OBC's greatest strengths: the Choir's ability to rise unanimously from near-silence to a great swell of sound. The work also presents several tricky changes of tempo, and these, too, were managed with precision, while singing in the original Russian seemed to be no problem.

And those basses? Interestingly, conductor Adrian Partington had decided to split the individual sopranos, altos, tenors and basses up across the full width of the Sheldonian, so there wasn't the usual safety-in-numbers that's to be obtained by placing all the voices singing each part together in a single block. The plus point of this arrangement was that conductor Partington achieved great clarity and transparency of sound as he wove the many complex strands of vocal line together. The minus side was that the basses didn't produce quite the necessary gravelly foundation for the upper parts although they benefited greatly from the confident lead given by bass soloist Adrian Hutton.

To give the Choir a couple of breaks, the Vigil was interspersed with Three Sacred Songs, also by Rachmaninov. Personally, I felt that these songs, as forcefully sung by contralto Martha McLorinan, rather broke the mood, and the beautiful sound created by the Choir for quite apart from the liturgical meaning of the words, an always engrossing musical narrative was unfolded by the OBC in this performance.