George Steiner once described Beethoven's Missa Solemnis as an "awesome encounter between God and one of the more god-like of his creatures", adding that "to have heard it out of deafness is to have wrestled with the angel". Embedded in every note of the score is a sense of monumental struggle to comprehend the nature of the divine and to understand humanity's betrayal of its own spiritual aspirations. No other religious work is, perhaps, more appropriate to our times. Beethoven sees war, evoked in the alarums of the Agnus Dei, as man's greatest refutation of the idea of God. The sight of George W Bush praying on the eve of Iraq would doubtless have struck him as the ultimate hypocrisy.

Kurt Masur's performance with the London Philharmonic Orchestra was, in the last analysis, as much political as religious. The uncertainties of the Agnus Dei were its focal point and the rest of the score seemed haunted by them. Speeds were on the fast side, with an urgent account of the Kyrie giving way to manic exaltation at the start of the Gloria. Yet Masur's hurtling approach also cramped the work's range. Where Beethoven pauses mid-Credo in awe struck contemplation of the incarnation, Masur pressed through the passage, robbing it of its mystery. The Benedictus, aspiring to timeless serenity, was hectored.

Beethoven's vocal writing, meanwhile, is strenuous in the extreme. The London Philharmonic Choir sang with fierce dexterity, though on more than one occasion the tenors sounded strained. The soloists were variable, with soprano Lynne Dawson, replacing Janice Watson at short notice, transposing a couple of Beethoven's high-lying phrases down an octave and tenor Thomas Studebaker battling with the implacable tessitura. The great performance came from Swedish contralto Anna Larsson, sumptuous of voice and communicating throughout both the agony and the ecstasy that were only intermittently present elsewhere.