The composer Jonathan Dove, the departing artistic director of the Spitalfields Festival, can always be relied on for ingenious and useful music. That’s certainly so with his Bach-themed Köthener Messe, given its London premiere on Wednesday by the English Concert following Bach’s motet Jesu meine Freude and the fourth Brandenburg concerto, the one with the dancing violin and recorders.

Dove’s compact Mass imagines Bach during his period as the Köthen court Kapellmeister, falling asleep during the drone of a church sermon and conjuring a dream Mass from fragments of his own instrumental music. Free of their usual moorings, motifs drift and find new companions. Snatches from the Brandenburgs meet relics from the first book of The Well-Tempered Klavier. Keys are mixed and transposed, phrases reiterated or left unfinished; yet from these shards and distortions Dove still weaves a tapestry that makes perfect musical sense. He also shapes a Mass both witty and reverent.

Bach isn’t the building block. Fauré wafts by, if only by chance, and selected terse rhythms in choral passages bear Stravinsky’s stamp. Heavy hands would have compromised this playful game, but the composer and the skilled executants offered nothing but the light and precise. Thirteen voices, scampering strings, the fourth Brandenburg’s two burbling recorders, continuo keyboards: these were all Dove needed. Conducting, Andrew Manze proved as dashing in this dream quilt as he was in the genuine Bach. An enchanting work; I can imagine many more performances.

Earlier, in the Brandenburg concerto the English Concert’s vim hit a wall: the Christ Church acoustic. Placed against the strings pressing hard, the two recorders disappeared. The sound balance in Jesu meine Freude was much better: Manze gave the motet, often performed unaccompanied, the most discreet instrumental support. The voices carried easily, eschewing the sounds of English honey for open vowels and bright attack.

And above and beyond, there was the pleasure of Hawksmoor’s restored building: a continuing wonder of space and light. Just like Bach.