St Bartholomew's is a magnificent auditorium with wonderful acoustics and high church decoration. Together with the murals sparkling under spotlights and resembling Russian iconographic paintings, it made the perfect setting for Rachmaninov's Vespers.

It took a while for the 170-strong choir to assemble on stage but, soon enough, James Morgan and the two soloists joined them and the concert began. Is there anything more moving than the sound of so many voices working together? The joy is in the control and the Brighton Festival Chorus control their voices superbly.

A stunning crescendo arrived early in the first movement the full choir opened their throats and roared out the invocation to worship and it was most compelling.

The real beauty, however, was in the interplay of the different voices. Although the choir is divided into the usual four ranges of soprano, alto, tenor and bass, there is little straightforward fourpart writing. Each voice is often given two or even three parts. This, combined with the physical size of the choir, made for an astonishing aural texture of interweaving vocal lines and it was a particular delight to hear the Russian low bass, so rare in the West, performed so well.

The entire work was performed in Old Church Slavonic. It must have been particularly taxing for the singers to concentrate on singing in this unfamiliar language while maintaining their control but they did extraordinarily well, with the pianissimo parts, which can easily be too quiet and lost in a church of this size or too loud and lose the dynamic contrast, pitched exactly right.

The soloists performed well but their parts were minor so they seemed almost an irrelevance, as the night belonged to James Morgan and the wonderful Brighton Festival Chorus.