One of the best ways to flesh out a somewhat slow summer season of classical music is to attend the Summer Festival of Sacred Music at St. Bartholomew’s Church, the former home of Leopold Stokowski and an institution that presents high quality music making year round. Attendance at a few of these weekly experiences is more edifying and much more entertaining than a perusal of any dry music history textbook of the survey variety.

Taking as their base settings of the mass, the St. Bart’s musicians contrast aesthetic liturgical approaches from the Renaissance to the present day. With Pope Benedict recently reinstating the Tridentine Mass, the Missa Brevis of Dietrich Buxtehude, the music of this past Sunday took on special significance.

Buxtehude is one of the most influential musicians in history: a direct inspiration for both Handel and Bach and a world-class improviser at the organ who died exactly 300 years ago. Normally, Sundays at St. Bart’s open with an organ prelude written by someone who has a connection, either thematic or historical, with the featured composer. But when the center of attention is Buxtehude, then it must be a piece by this Germanic master that begins the festivities.

Organist Christopher Creaghan actually intoned not a prelude but an ennobling Ciacona of Buxtehude that immediately put me in mind of some of the more powerful toccatas of Bach, especially in the use of throbbing bass and polyphonic elaboration. He saved the prelude—in DMinor BuxWV 140 — as a recessional.

The Missa Brevis is brevis for a reason: It contains only those parts of the Lutheran mass of the day that were still sung in Latin, composed in the strict contrapuntal manner of the stylus antiquus, and it recalls their mathematical way of many of the later constructions of Bach. The excellent St. Bart’s choir created an immediate angelic soar in the Kyrie, although some of the later high notes in the soprano section fell short of the celestial city. The Gloria is a much longer and more tightly developed section and includes a full treatment of the Agnus Dei as well. Most striking was the marvelous construction of the piece as a whole, an architectural technique that would pass in direct lineage from Buxtehude to Bach to Mozart.

The trademark of these concerts is their contextual revelations. By contrast this day, music director William K. Trafka programmed a jaunty motet of Buxtehude titled Cantate Domino, the joyful noise of which was infectious and well communicated by the singers, including soprano soloists Martha Sullivan and Kathleen Hayes and bass Jeff Morrissey. Although Buxtehude is now known primarily as an organist, he wrote many fine vocal works as well and measures up significantly well to Heinrich Schuetz.

In the spirit of ecumenicalism, Mr. Trafka also scheduled two pieces of Catholic liturgy, from the Missa “Il me suffit” of Orlando de Lassus. It only took two notes to hear the distinct contrast between the musical expressions of these two great faiths, whose ideas of the sacred are so elementally distinct. The resultant otherworldy harmonies reminded of the golden line within the Roman church that flourishedin, ofallplaces, Catholic Austria, a continuous braid that encompassed such otherwise divergent composers as Schubert, Bruckner, and Webern. In less than an hour and a half, the audience was exposed to some salient points of musicological history and enjoyed a complete Sunday service as well.

Although the story has been rather successfully debunked by certain scholars, the myth that Bach walked 200 miles to Luebeck to hear Buxtehude play is still in common usage. In the St. Bart’s version, which was printed in the program booklet and mentioned by the minister himself, old Johann Sebastian seems to have traversed 300 miles on foot. Apparently the legend still grows as we speak.