By Nestor CASTIGLIONE

It’s easy to lose track of the fact that beneath the encrustations that have disfigured the Christmas season — the avarice, the sentimentality, and above all the sales, sales, sales — there remain the holiday’s roots, perhaps looking worn, but still plunging deep into the soil of religious rite.

Music, Beethoven once opined, is the mediator between the physical and spiritual. So it’s appropriate that in their disparate ways, these three concerts that took place over the weekend served as a much-needed reminder that the spiritual remains an integral part of the holiday season.

Last Friday night in Pasadena City College’s Westerbeck Hall, the Salastina Musical Society performed excerpts from Handel’s “Messiah” that did away with the work’s usual associations with pomp and might. Instead, their performance stripped down the work to one player per part. With only nine musicians on stage, the result was the concentration of the cosmic into the particular; a retelling of Christ’s life that transformed the Biblical epic into a personal story confided from friend to friend. One could argue that the Salastina offered a humanist, post-Christian “Messiah” at that, presenting the score as something that not only transcends time and place but even belief.

Theirs was a buoyant, even jaunty performance. The message at the heart of this score, as the Salastina made amply clear, was one of joy.

The men of the vocal quartet were especially fine. Jon Lee Keenan’s tenor sailed along waves of liquid legato; his silvery top register lending extra shimmer to the music’s light. Michael Aiello’s baritone was no less impressive, agile and imposing all at once in Handel’s melismatic voice writing. Harpsichordist Maxim Velichkin provided the tasteful continuo.

It was a pity, then, that the performances were tethered to mawkish choreography by Grete Gryzwana and emceeing by Brian Lauritzen. Somewhat ironic considering that the host himself opened the concert by playing up the score’s power to speak unencumbered to listeners today. Instead, the precious narration and dancing left the inadvertently woeful impression that perhaps Handel’s music can’t be trusted enough to speak for itself after all.

Solemn devotion and mysticism were the hallmarks of last Sunday afternoon’s Dilijan Chamber Series program at the Zipper Hall in Downtown Los Angeles.

Divergent though they were in style and place, Bach and Komitas — the sole composers on the Dilijan program — were united by a compositional outlook that was founded on a bedrock of Christian faith.

Violinist Movses Pogossian’s opened the program with a plaintive and richly expressive reading of the German master’s ‘Chaconne’ from the “Partita No. 2 in D minor for solo violin.” His was no routine, emptily virtuosic traversal of this Everest of the solo violin. Here was a prayer, a supplication of such intensity and intimacy that the listener felt as if they had intruded into someone’s private communion with the hereafter.

Pogossian returned in the second half to perform the complete “Partita No. 2,” this time in an imaginative setting that intertwined various chorales by Bach as counterpoint and commentary. The earlier soliloquy now took on the cast of a call-and-answer dialogue, with the response of the Divine in the guise of the Lark Choir — in splendid form under its director Vatsche Barsoumian. The message was somber yet strangely comforting: Death and the eternal live among us, sometimes watching from afar, sometimes taking us in its embrace.

The program’s pivot were six songs by Komitas, split into sets of three each that revolved around themes of love and exile respectively. Shoushik Barsoumian’s soprano glowed resplendently without overpowering the music’s fragile simplicity. Her accompanist, pianist Steven Vanhauwaert, followed her unfailingly, delineating the fresh and natural beauty of these scores’ harmonies without need of cosmeticization.

Perhaps the most memorable display from last week of spiritual power in music came from a concert that neither explicitly or implicitly had associations with Christmas or religion.

Saturday night saw composer Terry Riley, joined by son Gyan, take the stage of the Harold M. Williams Auditorium at The Getty Museum in a near-hour long improvisational concert of keyboards and guitar intended to form the musical portion of a light show entitled “Untitled (Shepherd-Risset Glissando Color)” by Peter Coffin.

While the “immersive artwork,” as it was ambitiously billed by the museum’s marketing scribes, proved to be soporific, it was the music by Riley père et fils that lingered long after the somewhat mystified audience had cleared out of the hall.

The grand old man of the minimalist movement, now in his 81st year, has lost none of his ability to delight and even shock with the passing of the decades.

A wide-ranging improvisation that touched at times on world music, jazz, rock, and — in one uproarious moment near the set’s close — a kind of wacky, as-reimagined-by-Klasky-Csupo techno (a friend who attended the concert referred to this moment as “Terry Riley scores ‘Super Mario Bros.’”), it was music that seemed to tap into the pulsation of a stream of feeling and thought that, through Riley, was diverted momentarily to listeners in the earthly realm, intimating briefly to them an entirely other realm beyond the quotidian.

  Nestor CASTIGLIONE