The word “great” is going to be stated, or implied, rather a lot here. Christine Rice is, after all, one of the world’s great mezzos, and her partnership with Julius Drake has long been something to seek out at every opportunity. Add to the mix a young viola player already in the top league, Timothy Ridout, and a programme featuring music by an individual voice among composers, Rebecca Clarke, and there was reason enough to travel to Oxford yesterday.

On the whole the Bible is not big on sex and sensuality, with the exception of one very short book in the Old Testament. The Song of Solomon – aka Song of Songs – is a hymn to carnal pleasure, one whose vivid descriptions of perfect flesh and brimming wine flagons have divided religious scholars for centuries.

As any good choral singer knows, you can’t deliver too emphatic a “k” for the opening Kyrie Eleison of any one of thousands of Mass settings. Well, almost. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra Chorus produced such a distinct, detached, and powerful opening consonant for this performance of Bach’s B minor Mass that it seemed to bounce several times round the auditorium before being enveloped by the great tide of chromaticism that characterises this magisterial movement.

Bach: Goldberg Variations Víkingur Ólafsson (piano) (DG)

Bach Goldberg Variations Reimagined Rachel Podger/Brecon Baroque (Channel Classics)

Songs of Wars I Have Seen is an hour-long through=composed work by contemporary German composer Heiner Goebbels which combines the music of 17th century composer Matthew Locke, the text from the wartime diaries of American Jewish writer Gertude Stein and Goebbels’s own ingenious musical and dramatic ideas.

I wouldn’t say that I am super religious, but I am definitely religion-curious. It is a big part of my family background, and, to be honest, a big part of the history of my chosen field, Western classical music. For the past 1000 years, the church has been the most powerful commissioner of Western music, and its most active employer of musicians.

Because of this, much of our foundational repertoire is explicitly on the subject of how music helps a listener get in the mood for a religious experience. And that is interesting to me.

Poetry came an honourable second to sharp rhythms and lurid definition in this choreographic poem of a concert. You don’t get more tumultuous applause after an opener than with Ravel’s La Valse played like this. Vienna may have nearly collapsed after World War One, but the Scheherazade of Fazil Say’s 1001 Nights Violin Concerto lives to see a bright dawn, and Rachmaninov cries “Alliluya’ to whirling demons in his swansong Symphonic Dances.

Ben Gernon’s relationship with the BBC Philharmonic has been a richly rewarding one over the close-on seven years since his appointment as their principal guest conductor began, and indeed subsequently. 

The impression gained on his first Bridgewater Hall concert with them back in 2017 – that one of his instincts is to give an orchestra what it needs and then let the players do what they do best – was again clear in this programme of popular repertoire works which he took over from an indisposed Mark Wigglesworth.

Promising on paper, dazzling in practice: with a superlative soloist and conductor, this programme just soared on wings of philosophy-into-music. The spotlighting of NSO co-leader Elaine Clark provided another thread, from the opening chant of Linda Buckley‘s Fall Approaches through the keen dialogues with collegial Baiba Skride in Bernstein’s dazzling Serenade to the Viennese-waltz Dance Song of Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra.

If there’s a better name for a vocal group than Roomful of Teeth I have yet to come across it. But if it conjures up images of brash, in-your-face showbiz the reality couldn’t be more different.