The industrious London Handel Festival, now in full swing, switched tracks on Good Friday for a performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, the day on which it was probably first performed in 1727 and which this year fell on Bach’s birthday.

The simple dignity of St George’s Hanover Square, where Handel worshipped and which opened its doors just two years earlier in 1725, provided an ideal setting for a vigorous, heartfelt performance given by small forces, top-quality period instrumentalists and talented young soloists.

Whereas Bach hardly had a chance to hear this music, modern audiences have a whole performing tradition, from Gustav Leonhardt to John Eliot Gardiner, ringing in their ears. The challenge here, in an account given in the context of Vespers and without applause, was to forget CD perfection and simply listen afresh.

Laurence Cummings, London Handel Festival director, conducted expertly from two keyboards, a small harpsichord and a chamber organ. Tempos were brisk but pliant, with momentum kept up by Cummings’s pivotal role as continuo player, supported by a keenly attentive cellist.

Nicholas Mulroy’s Evangelist, at first introspective, opened into an intense, sensitive account. Alto Christopher Ainslie offered a pure-voiced Erbarme dich and the sumptuous-voiced Derek Welton, as yet unyielding but full of promise, was a fine Christus.

The work’s two sections were book-ended by Lutheran hymns and an ethereal 16th-century Latin motet, Ecce quomodo moritur, by Jakob Handl, which appeared on the order sheet for that first Leipzig Good Friday performance. This provided a calm, meditative conclusion, in sharp contrast to the release of cheerful applause we’re now more used to.

Whether your primary response to the St Matthew Passion is musical or devotional, this felt rewardingly close to the way Bach’s contemporaries might have experienced his masterpiece.