ENGLAND’s second city fields a wealth of choral societies. One of the most celebrated is the Birmingham Bach Choir, which recently celebrated its centenary. It is still directed (after three decades) by the renowned composer, conductor, and biographer Paul Spicer, who programmed their imaginative latest concert in St Paul’s, Hockley (known as the Jewellery Quarter), near the city centre.

Rachmaninov’s Liturgy of St John Chrysostom was one of its recent triumphs. Here’s hoping that Spicer’s own Easter Oratorio, which made such an impact in Lichfield Cathedral, may be dusted down and resurface soon widely elsewhere. It is a hugely rewarding work for any choral society to adopt.

Hence, typically, the Birmingham Bach Choir’s latest concert featured some inexplicably unusual Bach: his profoundly reassuring a cappella funeral motet, Fürchte dich nicht, ich bin bei dir: “Be not afeard, I am with you”, drawing on Isaiah 41, but also Jeremiah 1.

It preceded the Stabat Mater of Domenico Scarlatti, even more famous son of the acclaimed Alessandro, and born the same year as both Handel and Bach.

Placed third and last came a magnificent — at times, almost fiery — rendering of Franz (in Hungarian, Ferenc) Liszt’s Missa Choralis, one of four (or five) Masses by the dazzling piano virtuoso: his Szekszárd Mass; the better-known Missa Solennis or Graner Messe (1855), the triumphant Hungarian Coronation Mass, in 1866, a year after the present work; an earlier version for male-voice choir; and a Requiem Mass in 1868.

I originally (as a student) didn’t admire the present work, the Missa Choralis, on disc, finding it a bit lame and tame, compared with his spikier Via Crucis and the fine, in a few places almost Wagnerian, oratorio Christus. In fact, soon after he entered minor orders, Liszt composed numerous sacred anthems and motets.

But Spicer’s rendering with his enthusiastic and attentive choir achieved the unexpected. The Missa Choralis, as this by now animated choir revealed, is replete with excellence — of design, of expressive word-setting — and of much the same quality.

There were interludes. A Vivaldi concerto arranged by Bach and delivered with ample keyboard and pedal virtuosity by Martyn Rawles, Organist and Assistant Director of Music of Lichfield Cathedral, struck me as an inventive nonentity. Rawles’s far more interesting contribution was Bach’s moving prelude Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele. A miraculous reedy solo stop, as the chorale soars decorously above, rises to wondrous affirmation.

Scarlatti’s Stabat Mater is a gem that Spicer and this choir deemed well worthy of resurrecting. I admit, in all honesty, that it is not, on the whole, daring. Key changes are often momentary, and the work is surprisingly samey. There was a slight lack of incisiveness in the choir: Scarlatti’s effort was nothing that one could compare to Bach.

But Spicer’s masterful preparation of the choir did ensure that, even here, dynamic transitions — especially to mezzo piano (even a superb massed pianissimo) — were to everyone’s huge credit. Here was a fine introduction to the rare repertoire that a few of us might like to hear more of.