It’s uncanny sometimes how it works. There we were last Saturday in Hamer Hall to hear what Stephen Layton from Trinity College Cambridge makes of Bach’s Saint John Passion commanding the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and the massive one-hundred-and-twenty-strong chorus of the orchestra. Well, this great work, the alternate vision to the monumental St Matthew, was done with an extraordinary flair and dazzling tonal shading but we also had the sense of attending something like a religious event, a re-enactment which was all at once moodily lyrical and rivetingly austere.