The Sixteen is one of those musical institutions able to juggle popularity and integrity with the ease it displays in performing.

British to the core, the choir was founded by conductor Harry Christophers in the 1970s and is famed for singing works from the golden age of English polyphony and related early periods, as well as their 20th-century equivalents.

Sixteen singers is its basic number though here there were eighteen on the platform. But 'sixteen' could just as easily stand for ‘16th century‘, in which composers Thomas Tallis and William Byrd stood proud amid the seismic disruptions of the Reformation.

The choir's luminous, unruffled sound illustrated how these composers were at the eye of a storm, battling with ways of making the liturgy more accessible.

Tallis's Nine Tunes for Archbishop Parker's Psalter framed the evening, four being sung first and the rest at the end - one of them, the so-called Tallis's Canon, being repeated as an encore arranged by Bob Chilcott, formerly of the King’s Singers and the 'in' figure in British choral circles.

Madrigals by Byrd, Morley and Gibbons prefaced James Macmillan’s Sedebit Dominum Rex, one of his Strathclyde motets, which surpassingly marries ancient and modern temperaments.

Tippett’s Negro Spirituals from A Child of Our Time were contrasted with Britten’s Choral Dances from Gloriana, his spectacular failure of an opera, though the parallels drawn between them, the politico-religious Macmillan and those first embroiled polyphonists were a tad shaky.

The choir’s attention to continuously evolving tapestries of sound as much as its sensitivity to musical origins was everywhere apparent.