Baltimore’s Emmanuel Episcopal Church presents a concert series full of intriguing programs in a grand space, and it is well worth a trip north for D.C.-area classical fans. 

On Friday night, Music at Emmanuel featured an ensemble more often heard in the church on Sunday mornings: its own Emmanuel Choir, under music director Christian Lane with organist Karl Robson performing sacred music by Arvo Pärt and James MacMillan.

For this program, Lane assembled sets of pieces by the Estonian Pärt and the Scottish MacMillan, played without pause, to put their styles in relief and find common ground. Lane even assembled a hybrid Mass from parts of from Masses by each composer.

It was an ambitious concept, and Lane and the Emmanuel Choir deserve credit both for the attempt and the execution — with a few guests helping out, the choir’s four voices to a part filled the nave, with good intonation and keen attention to details of the sound. Though Pärt and MacMillan employ disparate styles, a similar intensity of spiritual feeling ran through the program.

At times, the texts in MacMillan’s pieces were difficult to hear, but MacMillan must accept some of the blame for that — oftentimes, the composer used the words as vehicles for musical drama rather than putting the text front and center. The program opener, “A new song,” began with organ drones picked up by the singers in an arresting effect, but when the music got busy, the words were obscured.

In the settings taken from his Mass, MacMillan showed something of a taste for irony. The choral parts of his “Gloria” burst with joy, but the music of the organ cast shadows on the words with minor-mode interjections and elaborations; his “Sanctus and Benedictus,” from the same mass, set the word “Hosanna” to pounding dissonant chords.

The most arresting MacMillan work on the program was his Miserere, from the same text set famously by Gregorio Allegri in the 17th century. Here, MacMillan grounded his florid outbursts by alternating them with chant-like passages, sustaining intensity and invention all the way to a stunning climax in the Emmanuel Choir’s performance.

Pärt’s minimalism makes for more effective devotional music — in his setting of “The deer’s cry,” a text taken from St. Patrick’s prayer, the mantra-like repetition of “Christ with me, Christ in me” laid a foundation for the music and for the prayer itself. The text was at the forefront in Pärt’s Mass settings, taken from his Berliner Messe, the “Credo” rhythmic and bright, the “Agnus Dei” rapt and hushed, with sustained organ tones running through the vocals like silver threads. “The Beatitudes” set the text from the Sermon on the Mount in homophonic textures, but with unexpected harmonic shading and surprising melodies, making the words feel unfamiliar and powerful; a radiant “Amen” surprisingly yielded to a dazzling, extended refraction of the music from Robson’s organ.

Smartly, Lane saved three crowd-pleasers for a program-ending final set. MacMillan’s “O radiant dawn,” an Advent staple, got a performance full of yearning from the Emmanuel Choir, with the repetitions of “come, come, come” a desperate plea. 

Hearing Pärt’s “Kyrie” felt like looking up at a mountain peak, as the composer cast the familiar words in hushed harmonies that made them austere and awe-inspiring. In “Da pacem Domine,” written after the 2004 terrorist bombings in Madrid, Pärt stretched out the vowels to emphasize his trademark tintinnabuli, creating a texture that, in this performance, shimmered and refracted like light reflecting off glass, a small flame of hope for trying times.

Music at Emmanuel presents the Mount Vernon Virtuosi performing music of Bach, Sibelius, Tania Léon and Friederich Gulda, 7 p.m. Saturday, March 15. emmanueldowntown.org

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