“There’s more than 16 singers there” grumbled the gentleman seated to my right at the Lichfield Cathedral leg of Harry Christophers and The Sixteen’s annual choral pilgrimage.

“They could get done under trade descriptions”. He vanished at the interval. It’s not easy to pin down what exactly draws an audience of close to 1,000 people to listen to a concert of unaccompanied Tudor vocal polyphony, but if one person, at least, missed the point of this superbly-performed evening of music by William Mundy, John Sheppard and Richard Davy, a huge number sat rapt.

Of course, The Sixteen have an unsurpassed reputation in this repertoire; Christophers pointed out that Mundy’s huge, lusciously-harmonised motet Vox Patris Caelestis, which closed the concert, featured in The Sixteen’s very first concert. Note-perfect intonation and tight but fluid ensemble were to be expected; what surprised, though, was the sheer tonal colour of Christophers’ forces.

The lower voices had a black, satisfyingly grainy quality; while the sopranos sang with a lightness and transparency that felt ideally suited to expressing the tension between the celestial and the earthly, so central to works like Davy’s melancholy sacred madrigal Ah, Mine Heart or Sheppard’s twin settings of the Libera Nos.

Deeply affecting, too, was the gentleness with which they rounded off the sighing phrases of Davy’s O Domine Caeli, and the bell-like hint of a bite that they gave to the quietly tolling background rhythm of Mundy’s Adolescentulus Sum. So there you have it: rare music, performed with absolute conviction by serious artists, draws a large and (mostly) appreciative audience. There’s a lesson in that, somewhere.