Cheltenham Festival Opening Concerts, Gloucester Cathedral/ Cheltenham Town Hall

Ghostly echoes in the Mass

Music, said the philosopher Suzanne Langer in one of her pithier moments, is virtual time. She might have added something about space. Friday's opening concert of the Cheltenham Festival, in Gloucester Cathedral, had me and others scurrying round that astonishing building in search of some spot from which it would actually be possible to hear the music, rather than its acoustic ghost. On the other hand, by turning Cheltenham Town Hall sideways for Monday's concert of Bach and Stravinsky, the festival transformed that splendid but slightly ponderous arena into a chamber that cleverly faked intimacy, to the great advantage of both the featured composers.

Stravinsky often had trouble with venues. His Octet was first performed in the Paris Opera, and his Mass, which he thought of as liturgical and which is distantly modelled on the 15th-century Ars Nova, had its first outing on the stage of La Scala, Milan. The composer was mercifully elsewhere on that occasion, but I wonder if he would have been much happier with the vast aquarium of Gloucester's nave, which made fish soup of his precisely calculated voice and wind textures. I thought that Stephen Cleobury, conducting the admirable BBC Singers (with women's voices, of course – Stravinsky wanted children), could have done more, through attack and articulation, to compensate, but in the end the difficulty was probably insuperable.

Older music – especially Bach's Komm, Jesu, Komm, exquisitely sung, and the three sacrae cantiones of Gesualdo, for which Stravinsky himself supplied missing parts – fared better, despite some bizarre effects of balance, due to the big, round Norman pillars having mischievous fun with selective resonances. But the world premiere of Michael Zev Gordon's Red Sea, an intriguing and ambitious setting of Jewish and Palestinian exile texts for the same forces as the Mass, suffered incalculably, its intricate vocal polyphonies reduced to expressive crowd effects in the manner of Penderecki. Some brilliant wind interludes survived, not always perhaps concealing their harmonic debt to Stravinsky. Beyond that, it would be unfair to judge.

Monday's concert, in the round, was a very different kettle of fish. Here everything was lucid and audible, and one was brought close to the music. Emma Kirkby – pure of voice and technically immaculate – gave an unforgettable account of Bach's Cantata No 84, Ich Bin Vergnügt mit Neinem Glücke, and there was a brilliant, more physical, self-immolatory performance of Cantata No 55, Ich Armer Mensch, Ich Sündenknecht, by the tenor James Gilchrist. London Baroque, accompanying, were superb in every way.

The two singers were then joined by the modern instruments of Endymion and the RNCM New Ensemble Voices for a rare performance of Stravinsky's awkward but haunting Cantata. It was a revelation. Gilchrist's singing of the long central Ricercar had effortless stamina, was attentive to rhythm and expression, and in short made the piece gripping, instead of the ordeal it usually is. But every detail of the performance, conducted by Peter Stark, was carefully prepared, and the work "sounded" for the first time that I can remember. The whole concert was a huge treat.

The opening night concert is broadcast on Radio 3 today at 7.30pm