Westminster Abbey Choir / St James's Baroque (Lufthansa Festival)

Westminster Abbey was the venue for the penultimate concert in the 2007 Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music: a performance from the Abbey choir and St James's Baroque under Master of the Choristers James O'Donnell. And the airline executives were out in force, perhaps tempted by some home-soil programming in the form of motets, cantatas, sinfonias and the rare 'Lutheran Mass' by Johann Sebastian Bach.

The Abbey choir was on unfamiliar ground here, literally speaking: positioned on staging in front of the quire screen and perhaps a little perturbed to be without the antiphonal reassurance its members are used to in the stalls. And you don't have to be Larry Kirkegaard to realise that this isn't the best spot acoustically for singers or players (or audiences, for that matter) - the choir sounded hesitant and underpowered (which they usually don't), and when the orchestra welcomed its trumpets and drums, they too seemed a mile away. In fact, it was only in the final work, the cantata O ewiges Feuer, O Ursprung der Liebe (BWV34) that the choir and orchestra settled into some sort of effective dialogue and equilibrium, a default symptom, perhaps, of the cantata's frequent forte dynamic markings - at least they could hear each other. If there was one moment of impressive musical focus and style, it was in this cantata's final chorus, well-paced and effectively cast-off by O'Donnell.

But elsewhere there were problems, perhaps stemming from the hearing difficulties of the performance area, or perhaps from the occasional ambiguity of the bar-to-bar beat provided by O'Donnell - a fine musician with a deserved reputation for interpreting renaissance polyphony (and other hardcore, non-orchestral liturgical fare), but who didn't reveal the punchiness of Bach's instrumental writing. Stand-in soprano Rebecca Outram was characteristically bright and baroque-savvy, but struggled periodically with the sheer complexity of the music which one imagines she'd first read just hours before, whilst counter-tenor Charles Humphries wasn't always in control of his nevertheless attractive and powerful voice.

In its unaccompanied pieces, particularly the motet Komm, jesu, komm (BWV229), the Abbey choir phrased impressively and maintained impeccable tuning, but there could have been more light and shade, and from a choir known for its clipped 'Englishness', a more sophisticated blend. The strings of St James's Baroque played sensitively and with direction and shape both in the choral and purely instrumental works (their leader Sophie Gent stepping up to play solos with poise and elegance) but the brass were rather more gung-ho - though you felt for them back there, blasting it out may have been the only way forward, and one struggled to hear the woodwind at all. It had you wondering why we couldn't have heard the same concert at St John's Smith Square, the venue for the rest of the Lufthansa Festival. It might have been a squeeze on the stage, but at least we'd have had the clarity that this programme deserved. Besides, the ensemble could have done with rubbing shoulders a bit more, both literally and musically.

Andrew Mellor