We have become so used to experiencing Bach's St Matthew Passion in the concert hall that we easily forget it was intended to be heard in church as part of a living tradition of worship. Its first listeners would have been a congregation rather than an audience: by joining the choir in the chorales, they would also have been active participants in a communal act of meditation and ritual mourning.

Conductor Ivan Fischer's performance with the Choir and Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment was a brave, if occasionally misguided, attempt to revert to Bach's original intentions. The audience was handed the music on the way in, briefly rehearsed before the performance began, and asked to join the chorales as much, or as little, as they wanted. That Fischer asked for the chorales to be sung in English and the rest of the work in German was potentially controversial, though it mattered little. Initially tentative, the audience's singing grew in volume and commitment as the evening progressed.

Yet for all that, there were considerable flaws. Throughout, I wished we had been in a church, since sustaining a mood of communal religious devotion in the secular anonymity of the Queen Elizabeth Hall proved well nigh impossible. Another drawback was Fischer's decision, following Bach's original practice, to allot the arias to members of the choir, though the results were very variable. Platform diction was poor, with the exception of Rufus Müller's gloriously sung Evangelist and Peter Harvey's sorrowing Christus. Fischer himself was immaculate in his negotiation of the fine line between dramatic and meditative. The playing was ravishingly beautiful, the choral singing at once refined and tremendously dignified.