Dry as dust, or alternatively coming complete with a massive echo guaranteed to turn every piece of music into a mushy blur, it's not every concert venue that has the potential to enhance a performance. Just across the Berkshire border, however, lies an acoustic star: Douai Abbey. With a Decorated Gothic east end, left unfinished in 1933, Douai waited 60 years for completion. In 1993, Michael Blee's absolutely stunning west end was added, its wooden beams soaring effortlessly upwards to meet the top of the original Gothic arches (see picture).

No wonder that Oxfordshire-based choir Choros decided to use Douai for its performance of Bach's St John Passion. Conductor Janet Lincé used the building's well-regulated reverberation to telling effect - for instance, she allowed the chorus's spat-out interjections to die away completely before carrying on with the next line of the Evangelist's narration.

And talking of the Evangelist, also making the journey from his Oxfordshire home was James Gilchrist. If there is anyone in the world who is currently a better Evangelist in the Bach Passions than Gilchrist, I have certainly never heard him, either live or on CD. Gilchrist must have led the way through both St Matthew and St John hundreds of times by now, yet each performance sounds completely fresh, as he judges the shifting sands of operatic drama, and religious devotion with unerring skill.

Stephen Charlesworth's Christus was also notably expressive, and there was a strong performance from tenor Hugo Tucker. Soprano Janet Coxwell and counter tenor Glenn Kesby both sounded a bit disjointed to begin with, and tended to disappear beneath Canzona, the highly effective period instrument band. But both singers came into their own later on. Meanwhile, Janet Lincé obtained both attack, and a real sense of prayerful devotion from Choros - "We are not permitted to put anyone to death", for instance, was spine-tingling. Above all, Lincé knows that you don't 'interpret' Bach; you allow him to speak for himself.