Lent may be a time for spartan eating, but one can still feast on its musical riches. The Spectrum Singers, perhaps with September 11 in mind, concocted a short but powerful program for their concert at Emmanuel Church last Friday: Bach’s Motet BWV 227, Jesu, meine Freude, and Schütz’s Musikalische Exequien. Both are somber funeral pieces, but both also take comfort in the love of Christ and the life everlasting, and that sense of spiritual uplift was conveyed at Emmanuel.

The most substantial of Bach’s motets, Jesu, meine Freude was probably written for Johanna Maria Keeß, the wife of the Leipzig postmaster general, whose funeral service was held on July 18, 1723. Six chorale settings of the 1653 hymn by Johann Franck and Johann Krüger alternate with five freer settings of texts from Romans 8; the message is that the body may die but those who live in Christ live on. I was apprehensive to see 42 singers plus soloists — sopranos Roberta Anderson and Gail Abbey, alto Gloria Raymond, tenor Frank Kelley, and bass Mark Andrew Cleveland — and music director John W. Ehrlich fill the Emmanuel chancel, and indeed the choir seemed fuzzy throughout, with indifferent articulation of the German consonants. Perhaps the Emmanuel acoustic was too soft; perhaps nothing was going to satisfy me the night after hearing Thomas Quasthoff. Even the soloists frustrated, Anderson too bright, Raymond too muted, nothing quite blending. The fog cleared abruptly for the next-to-last chorale, "Gute Nacht, o Wesen," with a delicate interplay among the soloists and Kelley lacerating in his admonition to "Stolz und Pracht" ("pride and splendor") to skedaddle.

Spectrum’s Musikalische Exequien was the second performance of Schütz’s German requiem to grace Boston in the past month — Philippe Herreweghe and La Chapelle Royale performed it at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in mid February (the same night I was listening to Quasthoff sing Schumann’s Faust with the Berlin Philharmonic). This masterwork, which Schütz completed in 1635 for the funeral of his friend Prince Heinrich Reuß, is darker than Jesu, meine Freude (Schütz’s own life was surrounded by death) and more Italianate, though the madrigal-like solos are punctuated by choral outbursts of disquieting modal purity. The same large group of singers appeared, but here the performance snapped immediately into focus, with the soloists wrapping their voices around one another unselfconsciously, Raymond maternal in her "Gehe hin, mein Volk" ("Go forth, my people"), Kelley reassuring for "Ich weiß, daß mein Erlöser lebt" ("I know that my redeemer lives"). The choir too was more animated, by turns ineffably tender ("Erbarm dich über uns" — "Lord have mercy") and irresistibly surging ("Durch ihn ist uns vergeben" — "Through him our sins are forgiven"). In "Weil du vom Tod erstanden bist" ("Because you rose from the dead"), Ehrlich even had his forces swinging like Praetorius. And in the motet that forms the second part of the work (the Song of Simeon concludes it), the antiphonal choirs tossed "So bist du doch, Gott" back and forth like hot biscuit. Herreweghe’s 1987 Harmonia Mundi recording (with half as many singers) has greater clarity and balance, but not the same contagious fervor.