Robert Parsons is doubtless best known for his Ave Maria, which has been widely anthologised; it concludes this recital, which boasts several other Latin works including Parsons’s most ambitious, the Magnificat. But this recording is mostly taken up with his First Great Service, conceived as a memorial to the composer as it might have been conducted by White’s colleagues at the Chapel Royal following his tragic death by drowning in 1572. The alternation of English and Latin works well as a programme, and the recorded ambience for the Great Service immediately puts one reassuringly in mind of just such a liturgical event, of a winter’s evening, perhaps, with cold weather and darkness without. But it also shows this choir’s greater security in the English repertory than in the Latin. The Magnificat, which opens the disc, is an ambitious work in the post-Eton Choirbook vein, whose stratospherically high treble part audibly strains the sopranos. The other motets are more subdued affairs, in keeping with the occasion portrayed, but even so I find the tone overly reverent, the tempi a touch too slow. The Ave Maria is the best-known casualty; the Libera me is nicely shaped, if a little over-emphatic at times. Technically, then, this is not quite top-drawer, but at its best (as in the Great Service) it rehabilitates a composer who deserves at least this much.