If anyone needed any further proof that musical performance can provide a blissful mind-altering experience, this was provided in Sunday evening's concert by the Chamber Choir Coro at the Fitters Workshop. I have to confess to being a little sceptical about an hour of Renaissance polyphony in this space. The acoustic is capricious and a dangerous force in its own right. What a musical director may hope to capture and use as sympathetic reverb can sabotage a concert by turning respectable performances into a muddy mess. Coro's Music by Numbers was a wonderful amalgam of a brilliantly conceived and structured repertoire (thank you Andrew Fysh); beautifully balanced, intelligently used voices (congratulations Paul Eldon and David Mackay for your vision), and careful management of the auditorium's acoustic properties and unshakeable conducting by Peter Tregear.

The idea underlying the programming was essentially simple: beginning with a single plainchant line, sung as a processional: Praeter rerum serium, part by part the works were built to the final climactic 12-part Regina caeli laertre by Nicolas Gombert, sung in the round for maximum effect, realising the extremely weird "simultaneous false relations" employed to great effect by the composer.

The disarming simplicity of Praetorius's Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme established a spacious and unhurried approach to each work in the program, and the choir maintained focus throughout a very demanding program. Jean Richafort's Trut avant, il faut boire had a few murky moments as the tempo and the reverberation balanced precariously, but this was momentary and the last line, "Tru, tru, trut avant" faded into the crystalline performance of Josquin Desprez's Ave Maria…Virgo Serena. Complex harmonies forming and resolving were sung skillfully in Jacob Handl's Mirabile Mysterium, complementing Palestrina's Credo from Missa Papae Marcelli with the setting presenting the composer's unequalled talent for word-painting to convey the meaning of the Credo in spine-tingling music.

Miserere nostri, Domine for seven parts by Thomas Tallis is indeed a "short but perfectly formed masterpiece" and this performance was extraordinary. The clever juxtaposition of multiple canons and the sensational sound cloud created by layers of translucent harmonies made this the stand-out work of the evening, closely followed by Victoria's Kyrie and Gloria from Missa pro victoria. Superb, precise singing from the sopranos in Orlando di Lasso's Aurora lucis rutilat distinguished this performance, and was sustained in Hassler's Miserere mei, Deus to complement the warm resonance of the lower male voices.

The devilishly tricky 13-part encore Jesus autem transiens, Credo in Deum encore by Robert Wylkynson pleased the audience. Patrons were loath to leave after a late summer's afternoon immersed in timeless sacred music resonating in a strangely magical decommissioned industrial space.