Last night my wife and I attended a packed Royal Albert Hall to hear Bach’s Mass in B Minor, performed by Les Arts Florissants, a group from France founded by William Christie, an American. This was a Promenade Concert, one performance in the longest annual music festival in the world, lasting two months every year.

You don’t have to be religious or be a believer to be uplifted by this glorious work of art that raises you from the realm of the ordinary and reminds you forcibly how very unimportant are the trifling irritations and problems one is confronted with day by day. One doesn’t need to have struggled mightily over musical counterpoint and four-part harmony to recognise how extraordinary was Bach, a genius and a true product of the Enlightenment. This major work is over 260 years old and is as fresh as ever it was, truly uplifting. I found I had tears in my eyes as I reflected on the debt we owe these rare men (and women) who contribute so much beauty and meaning to the world.

And then downstage came a counter-tenor, an Englishman called Tim Mead. I cannot remember ever having heard a more clear and faultless voice in my life. I was not alone. You could hear a pin drop. The applause at the end of the Mass was louder and longer than anything I have heard since Gustavo Dudamel conducted the Sistema orchestra from Venezuela in the same concert hall years ago.

We all need these moments of exaltation to remind us that our fellow human beings still pack huge auditoriums to hear beautiful music, or throng to galleries to enjoy great art. We must, all of us, make time to observe and enjoy the great creations of humanity. And if I seem a bit excited at six in the morning, then I am simply enjoying an Epicurean moment, recognising the positive artistic achievments of the human race that belong to us all. It’s such a pleasure to write about something so rewarding.