In the secular west, music often takes the place of religion as a way of lifting the soul to a higher plane. Last Sunday, Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducted J.S. Bach's titanic B Minor Mass at the Royal Albert Hall in a performance that banished gravity and had a capacity audience floating heavenward - the vast, circular, red-velvet hall transformed into a cathedral to the religion of music.
Hans Georg Nageli, the first publisher of Bach's B Minor Mass, called it 'the greatest musical work of all times and nations' - and now, 200 years later, many would still agree.
Gardiner elected to conduct the two-hour mass without an interval. Each of its 24 sections was a rung on a ladder to heaven, ending with the Dona nobis pacem (Grant us peace).
Other than the harpsichord going off-key, probably due to the mid-summer city humidity, Gardiner brought the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque soloists and orchestra together in a performance that revealed an underlying architectural unity in a work that's often criticised for being cobbled together from bits and pieces of Bach's earlier works.
Recycling one's musical oeuvre was commonplace for Baroque composers - this act of self-reference being an art in itself. Modern obsessions with originality are swept aside when great performances such as this are heard.
Bach was a Protestant who composed this Latin mass as a commission for a German prince who had converted to Catholicism so that he could bag the Polish throne.