The Barbican Hall is many things, but it is not the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. The theatre for which Wagner wrote his last opera, Parsifal, offers an acoustical phenomenon not replicated anywhere in the world and certainly not at the Barbican.

Last night’s performance of the Prelude and Good Friday Music under Jirí Belohlávek almost inevitably lacked the atmosphere and spirituality the work is intended to conjure. There were some well taken wind and brass solos but with the orchestra under our noses rather than sunk in a “mystical abyss” as at Bayreuth, there was little sense of the requisite dovetailing of timbres or floating weightlessness.

Nor of course does the Barbican much resemble the spacious Augustinerkirche in Vienna, where Bruckner’s F minor Mass was first performed in 1872. It was an imaginative idea to couple this work with the Wagner but again there was a lack of transcendence which was partly to do with the ambience and partly, it has to be said, with the work itself. Short on the expansive, elevated kind of music familiar from the symphonies, the Mass is paradoxically at its most appealing when least characteristic: the gorgeously lyrical Benedictus recalls similar movements of Schubert.

Karen Cargill and Robert Murray shone in a fine line-up of soloists, with the BBC Symphony Chorus, alert and responsive as ever, in splendid form.
Live broadcast via BBC iPlayer.