The bulk of this programme consists of works by Palestrina to celebrate his quincentenary, in a kind of musical sandwich consisting of roughly twenty minutes of five works by him, forty minutes of the other eight other Vatican composers then another twenty minutes of a further five Palestrina pieces, making a neatly symmetrical programme.

The fifty-strong choir consists of boys from the London Oratory School and alumni from their Newman Choral Singers, who sing alongside those boys while pursuing their university studies. Thus their average age is fourteen; singing in four parts they make an exceptionally, pure, beautiful and homogeneous sound, though perhaps some small allowance has to be made for a lack of weight in the bass department, the singers being so young.

The spacious recording acoustic of the London Notre Dame church lends numinosity to the singing and director Charles Cole’s note stresses that the choir’s purpose is primarily liturgical rather than performative. All the works here are sung a cappella in Latin and the texts and translations are a welcome provision given the importance of the clarity of text in polyphonic music of the Counter-Reformation.

While the ten pieces by Palestrina will probably be familiar to some collectors, the eight pieces by composers mostly lesser-known—with the exception of Allegri, feted for his Miserere—will be new discoveries for many listeners. His Easter Sunday motet Christus resurgens for eight voices in double choir is especially rich and appealing, but I personally feel that the juxtaposition of Palestrina’s music with that of his Roman contemporaries mostly serves to emphasise its exceptional quality; its unique capacity for soaring transcendence is instantly apparent when we return to it with the famous Sicut cervus. The long lines of Peccantem me quotidie are impeccably tuned and sustained and the joyful Tu es Petrus makes a highly satisfying conclusion to a fine recital.