Most spiritual performances

[Mandryka]

First I didn't understand how 2 seconds or a bit or a never heard performance could be spiritual?

The answer came a little later. It doesn't matter how many bits or seconds it takes to know you are. That you were not born and will never die, that you are beyond time and space, that you and now are synonymous. You mean your self, not music you hear at the moment. Or even one not heard, it doesn't matter --spirituality is you.

What is very compelling is that there are very few things on the list that belong to the 20th century. Mahler songs, Rachmaninoff transcriptions, Prokofiev. Nothing in the list which is atonal, dissected, reduced, distorted or perverted. Nothing from the alluring games of the mind, the opposite of the spiritual.

Roger Reynolds is a good one to explore in that respect I think, The Serpent Snapping Eye for example. It's a partly improvised piece, I'm thinking of the performance with Edwin Harkins.

[atardecer]

Maybe this would qualify:

In 1915 Scriabin gave a spirited recital in St. Petersburg, towards the end he reportedly seemed to be in a kind of trance-state at the piano. Afterwards he said it was one of the few times he ever became so absorbed in the music that he became unaware of the audience. 

Two days later he unexpectedly passed away.