This year marks the tercentenary of Heinrich Biber's death, and a more joyful commemoration than the one at Bath Abbey could hardly be imagined. Biber was thought the greatest violinist of his day, so it was appropriate that it should be Andrew Manze, directing the English Concert from the violin, who stamped his particular brand of fire and virtuosity on this occasion.

Bath's coup was staging the first performance in Europe since the 17th century of Biber's choral work Missa Christi Resurgentis. The Easter mass, probably written for Salzburg Cathedral and dating from around 1673, collected three centuries' worth of dust in a Czech monastery vault before seeing the light in James Clements' recent millennium edition. Much earlier than most of his sacred and polychoral music, the mass nevertheless bears Biber's hallmark natural expressivity. Manze and his performers brought to it a ringing vibrancy.

The choir of the English Concert numbered just nine voices and, though the original galleried setting would have given a quadrophonic separation of two four-part choirs (plus one extra bass) and two complementary bodies of strings and brass, the tight grouping of forces on stage didn't prevent the intricate voice-leading from emerging clearly, with the Abbey's acoustic adding a warm resonance. Manze also achieved the perfect balance between Biber's irrepressible energy and the passages of calm purity, the latter sung with unfailing beauty by the first choir's soprano and mezzo.

Following the Salzburg custom of interspersing the mass sections with instrumental works, the Concert also played sonatas from Biber's Fidicinium Sacro- profanum, his tenth Rosary Sonata and Heinrich Schmelzer's Sonata for Brass and Continuo. All helped bestow a Baroque splendour on Bath's more usually austere glory. But nothing brought the past alive more than the singers' and brass-players' opening and closing chanted processionals, intoning Salzburg peasants' entry into church, and, finally, the nicely irreverent Ciacona with the Concert's bass violone, Peter McCarthy, as the nightwatchman calling time. Biber clearly had a sense of humour as well as a touch of genius.