Essayist and critic George Steiner argues that serious music puts us in the presence of something that exceeds language. Sitting in Guildford Grammar Chapel on Saturday evening, with the Giovanni Consort’s male voices massing in the lower registers of Arvo Pärt’s De Profundis, one feels the force of that claim as atmospheric pressure.

Baltic Sounds, the Consort’s ambitious survey of choral music from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, is anchored in its first half by Pärt’s 1980 setting of Psalm 130, scored here for TTBB, organ and percussion. Written in his signature tintinnabuli style, the work accumulates melodic fragments suspended in a shifting prism of spacious intervals as it heads towards the inevitable climax.

In this performance from the organ loft, the men’s voices open like a fissure in the earth. As Daniel van der Moezel’s organ ostinato moves beneath like tectonic drift, the Consort produces a gravity that almost reorganises – at least in one’s mind – the Chapel’s very architecture. Pärt composed this piece a year after leaving Estonia. Something of that exile is reflected in its cry from the depths.