The unmistakable sound of the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral, the youthful quality of the voices and the selection of pieces, all firm favourites with the choir, combine to make this an individual record of exceptional warmth and delight. It falls naturally into four sections, beginning with sixteenth-century music of the Latin rite, followed by English music of the Reformation, then of the Restoration, and finally music representing the Anglican revival of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among the Latin pieces Byrd's Haec dies (a gradual, not an antiphon, sung without its verse at Easter Vespers and the Hours) was remarkable for its controlled rhythmic exuberance, in striking contrast to the sustained ecstasy of Parsons's Ave Maria, with its almost unending ''Amen'', or the quiet devotion of Byrd's Ave verum corpus. A less familiar piece was the Tallis responsory Loquebantur (erroneously labelled 'Antiphon'), an exciting piece with alternating chant and polyphony. More consideration could have gone into matching up the tempo of the chant verses with the polyphonic repeats: this was an opportunity the singers unfortunately missed.
Knowing the Ely Lady Chapel well, I had entertained some scepticism when I read John Rutter's thoughts about the acoustics of the building—''which,'' he says, ''for the singing of a cappella polyphony is very possibly unequalled anywhere in northern Europe''. But listening to the Gibbons O clap your hands and the Purcell Lord, how long, I was persuaded to think again—and even more so when I listened to Walton's What cheer?. Was this capturing of the unique sound-quality of the Chapel due entirely to the exceptionally skilful remastering of the old 1982 tape? Britten's A hymn to the Virgin succeeded in convincing me that there was indeed something quite exceptional about the acoustics: the carefully distanced sound of the semi-chorus gave an impression of great depth with the balanced echoing of the Latin phrases. There was a distancing in time as well as space, linking the present with the past in a remarkable way. In the context of such a building this comes over as the unstated purpose of the whole performance.'