The Turbine Hall of Tate Modern has been described as a secular cathedral, and this instalment of the Tate and Egg Live series twinned it with a sacred one. Before a weekend that will be celebrated more as the annual festival of chocolate than as Easter, the idea of exploring spiritual and non-religious rituals of death and rebirth seemed either timely or redundant. But what was unintentionally demonstrated most strongly was how words become absorbed into ritual and in a way lose their currency.
St Paul's was the venue for the first half, in which John Eliot Gardiner conducted the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in three Bach cantatas, with Christ lag in Todesbanden at the centre. It was an undeniably atmospheric setting, despite the presence of scaffolding for the current restoration moves away from the dome. The swirling acoustic, however, was no advantage. Bach's echo effects began before the real echoes had died away and, despite the punchy articulation of some of the singing, there was a limit to how much impact these works could make.
Still, Gardiner and his musicians made the best of it. The recurring alleluias in the verses of Christ lag in Todesbanden came across well - jazzily syncopated, then almost lamenting, then winding down like a record. But elsewhere words were indistinct, and no translation was provided in the programme. For an event aimed at a broad audience, it was baffling that the organisers were content to leave us with so little idea of the meaning of what we were listening to.
From there we were led in procession over the Millennium Bridge to the other cathedral. The Turbine Hall was in darkness, with the choir and the marimba player Colin Currie placed above a screen. The composer Steve Martland had reworked his nursery rhyme settings, Street Songs, for the occasion; the Quay Brothers provided the visual realisation. These are mesmeric pieces, the rhymes reduced to their constituent parts, the music worrying away at snatches of melody. The film - using dark, veiled, insistently repeating images of a sinister, worn china doll - reflected this. The first three songs had a driving vitality. The fourth, Jenny Jones, was haunting, accompanied by a sequence in which an anatomical doll was taken apart and put together again. But even the revealing of the tiny model foetus inside the doll's uterus couldn't focus us on the idea of rebirth; the sense of violation from the taking apart of the doll was too strong.
