Richard Tanner, the Cathedral's director of music, explains how music can help us to put the Crucifixion in a context in which it can be approached.

My seven year old son, James, recently joined Blackburn Cathedral Choir.

On Palm Sunday the choir sang a powerful new setting of St Mark's Passion narrative, with music composed by my colleague, James Davy.

In the car yesterday, my James started talking to me about how he felt when he sang this work.

It had clearly got him, even at seven, thinking quite deeply at the start of Holy Week.

He said: "As I sang the music, I felt like I could actually see it happening.

"Being amongst the choir crying out 'crucify, crucify' made me feel really sick."

The crucifixion makes me sick... that must be a lot of people's experience.

I remember feeling much the same about four years ago when I watched Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ".

I suppose the thing to do is not to turn away, but to try to experience the Passion in a context in which it can be understood at its deepest level. This is where music always helps.

The poet George Herbert reminded us that 'the cross taught all wood to resound his name...' So there's a connection between the wood of calvary and the wood of a violin as it resounds with music.

This is the connection we'll be making at the cathedral when we perform the gruesome story of the crucifixion tonight in the musical context of Bach's St John Passion.

In Bach's great work, the drama of the Passion is immediately apparent in the opening chorus, with its hammering bass line, as if a spear is inflicting a wound, and at the same time the notes of the woodwind seem to be nails in the cross.

The chorus is constantly at the heart of the dramatic action, representing various elements within the Passion story - the rabble in the Garden of Gethsemane, the soldiers scourging Jesus, and the pompous High Priests.

All these provide moments of electric theatricality, none more so than the frenzied cry of the crowd - "Kreuzige" - "Crucify".

The Evangelist, too, who tells the story has many theatrical moments: the explosive description of the rending of the veil of the temple; the haunting moment when he describes Jesus' last words, "it is finished" and "then he bowed his head and gave up the ghost", and the poignant description of Peter's weeping.

The arias, sung by four soloists, provide intense reflection upon the narrative. The sense of utter heartbreak in "Come, ponder, O my soul", the depiction of Peter's despair in the jagged sounding "O my troubled mind", the depiction of grief in "Look how his back, stained with blood, is just like the sky".

These are three of the many examples of how the horror of it all is filtered through musical reflection.

At key moments, as the drama unfolds, the singing of Chorales (lutheran hymns) provide both powerful and poignant comment on the narrative and also draw lessons for everyday moral living.

Despite the anguish and the pain, the music concludes with the most beautiful and gentle chorus "Lie in peace, sacred body" and then the Chorale of prayer - "O Lord, send your cherubs in my last hour", which works on a resolution of discord, pointing us beyond the suffering to our own redemption beyond death, made possible through the agony on the Cross.

O Lord, send your cherubs in my last hour to bear my soul away to Abraham's bosom;
let it rest there untouched by any pain until the last day.
Wake me then from death's sleep, so that my joyful eyes may see you, the Son of God, my Saviour;
grant me this and I will glorify you throughout eternity.
Bach's St John Passion will be performed as part of the Cathedral's Holy Week devotions on Wednesday, 19th March at 7.30pm.