Renaissance Singers/Edward Wickham, St Paul's, Covent Garden, London

Brilliant complexity

If the world were going down and I could save only two composers, they would be Brahms and Lassus. Each of them speaks with a more natural humanity, an appeal that goes more directly to the heart, than any other.

Brahms we hear all the time, though he is still inadequately understood. Lassus, active three centuries earlier (he died in 1594), isn't part of the musical mainstream yet – he's still largely the preserve of the early-music mob – but the rich glow at the centre of his music is immediately moving; the potential audience is enormous.

But we face two problems in trying to hear Lassus as he was heard in his own day. His polyphony shines more brightly in the plain liturgical framework for which it was composed. And we spent our lives bombarded with aural stimulants; hearing complex music is nothing out of the ordinary for us.

In Lassus' time, life outside the court and chapel may not have been completely without music, but there was little opportunity to hear textures as complicated as those we now daily take for granted. The effect of the exhilarating sweep of Renaissance polyphony is therefore something for which modern listeners have to deploy their imagination, which makes presentations such as that of Lassus' Requiem by the Renaissance Singers, directed by Edward Wickham on All Souls' Night, all the more important – they allow you to enter, at least to some degree, into a lost and forgotten world.

There was no attempt at historical accuracy: this wasn't intended as a reconstruction. Rather, it was an attempt to suggest how the music might once have been heard, and how we might recapture some of that initial impact. The light in St Paul's (the "actors' church", built only a few decades after Lassus' death) was subdued, but for the bright banks of candles around the altar.

Lassus' Requiem setting and three motets interposed into it were heard in a framework of Gregorian chant that sets off its voluptuous beauty – the exultant upwards rush of voices at the beginning of the Offertory reflects the heady joy of souls escaping Hell – and his Nunc Dimittis shone from the centre of the concluding Compline as a diamond from its metal band.

Between the Requiem and Compline came a lecture from Julian Litten on the evolution of funerary procedures in late-Mediaeval and Renaissance England – interesting in its own right, but a strategic mistake at this point; Dr Litten's arch delivery sat at odds with the sombre atmosphere that the music and presentation had created. It should have preceded the concert, so that we could have added the fear of God to the other aspects of this music that history has stripped away.