Two new recordings, one from an established English vocal ensemble, the other from a younger one making its name, both presenting mostly well known repertory from the golden age of English polyphony. The more traditional programme comes from the older ensemble, the three composers concerned each represented by a better-known work and a lesser-known one. The most revealing of the latter is Parsons’s O bone Jesu, an extended setting of a text often set more succinctly on the continent during this period.

The Sixteen are on fine form in a repertory that often sees them at their most confident: Parsons’s Ave Maria, the best-known work here, is dispatched with considerable polish, and White’s five-part Lamentations are equally fluent (and what wonderful settings they are!). The acoustic is hardly resonant, but this is actually an advantage in thicker textures; it leaves the singers little room to hide, but they seldom need to.

Stile Antico’s programme is informed by an interesting twist: a selection of Byrd motets is interleaved with an equal number of Tallis’s Psalm Tunes for Archbishop Parker’s Psalter. Curiously, their immediate juxtaposition lends Tallis’s (very) short settings the character of antiphons to Byrd’s motets, several of which are among the most expansive he ever wrote. Better still, some of these tunes are very catchy: I particularly enjoyed “God grant with grace”, with its touchingly unassuming little canon.

Despite boasting a membership roughly equal to The Sixteen’s, Stile Antico perform without a director, and the use of choral effects (gradual build-ups of intensity, or the opposite) doesn’t seem overly staged. They certainly make a confident noise, helped by a sound recording that brings out the natural bloom of their sound: next to their older colleagues they sound as though they have something to prove. It’s admittedly impressive, and one wishes them well. Whether they say anything startlingly new about a repertory that is even better rehearsed than that on The Sixteen’s recording is a moot point, however. In the search for “the big sound”, there’s a danger of further monumentalising pieces that were conceived with small ensembles in mind (pace the booklet-notes’ somewhat defensive suggestions to the contrary). I’d welcome the opportunity to hear them in a repertory that calls for more positive interpretative decisions.