When Benjamin Britten began composing his all-male opera “Billy Budd,” he reached back to his experience as a boy chorister, turning to the cathedral for models of music with no women present. This Sunday at St. Bartholomew’s Church, as a part of the Summer Festival of Sacred Music, the featured music was a similarly modern work with no sopranos or altos — Maurice Duruflé’s “Messe cum jubilo.”

Where Britten expanded the male tessitura in his opera to its limits — from treble drummer boys to the evil bass-baritone of Claggert — Duruflé takes the opposite approach. His mass takes place almost exclusively in one range, with the fine line between tenor and baritone often blurred. Employing plainsong text reminiscent of the monastery, this inventive composer, who was for years the resident organist at St-Etienne-du-Mont in Paris, keeps his male voices tightly packed.

Although St. Bart’s does an excellent job of offering liturgical pieces from many differing eras, most of the jewels of this repertoire are decidedly pre-1800. It was thus especially pleasing to hear a work written in 1966, with an idiomatic sense much closer to that of our own day. Another special treat was the presence of a string orchestra, rather than the usual solo organ accompaniment.

Conductor William K. Trafka caught the spirit of the piece immediately with a somewhat jazzy interpretation of the Kyrie Eleison. Duruflé provides a plucked bass fiddle underpinning to reinforce this contemporary mood, and the pacing of the movement was relaxed and easygoing. After Bach and Monteverdi, Vierne and Palestrina, this was quite a refreshing expression of devotion. Those not familiar with Duruflé might take as a point of reference Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass,” which shares not only some quite similar dissonances but also a sense of the urbane and theatrical.

The Gloria is an arresting section, opening with excruciating chordal combinations in the organ, and ecstatic sounds from the chorus. This leads to a much more peaceful middle, only to plunge headlong back into the realm of the discordant. Solos by baritone Jonathan Hays, who was also very impressive in the later Benedictus, and tenor David Bryan were eloquent.

There is a long tradition that the Sanctus in a Mass should be the most ethereal section, the evocation of the heavenly choir or a superhuman view of angelic beings, often accomplished by the employment of the highest female voices descending down to earthly range. Of course, Duruflé had no such voices to work with, and his solution here is very inventive. Opening the movement without the orchestra, he gives deep rumblings to the organ, moving in the other direction of pitch to describe the ineffable quality of his subject. As the men sing in very similar ranges to each other, the real contrast is to this keyboard tone painting. Combined with the strange harmonies and sometimes shocking modulations, this Sanctus is otherworldly indeed.

Duruflé did not write much music in his lifetime, and what he did produce was subject to intense and time-consuming revision. Except for his Requiem, not many of his works are well-known today, even as they are still relatively new pieces. But he is clearly worth the effort, speaking in a vocabulary perhaps more effective for a 21st-century listener than that of the old masters do.

To begin the service, the organist Paolo Bordignon chose the early Scherzo, Op. 2. Here the composer uses the high register for celestial effect that has a hint of the mystical about it. Those who detected a little of the unique sound world of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” are to be congratulated, as Duruflé studied composition with Paul Dukas at the Paris Conservatoire.