That Peter Phillips and The Tallis Scholars have – after 50 years of concerts – never before recorded Sheppard’s Cantate Mass is an astonishing fact. This is after all the quintessential mid-century English Mass, the one that stands as the main beacon of the probably 60 years between the last Masses of Taverner and those of Byrd. And for that this new issue is all the more welcome. Welcome, of course, for all the qualities that have made The Tallis Scholars world leaders: absolute unanimity, perfect tuning, impeccable diction, stunning control and a seemingly effortless inevitability about everything they do.

Those who find themselves impatient with all that perfection will still perhaps turn to the 1996 recording by Paul McCreesh with the Gabrieli Consort and the boy choristers of Salisbury Cathedral: far closer to the probable sound that Sheppard would have imagined and far more impassioned (except that The Tallis Scholars up the ante by choosing a pitch a semitone higher than McCreesh). And with McCreesh you have all the chants that put the Mass into a plausible context.

But Phillips fills the rest of his disc with Latin service music, including the gorgeous Gaude, gaude, gaude Maria, with its magical middle section for four close-harmony high voices and a bass, and ending up with the glorious motet Gaude virgo Christiphera, not previously recorded, I think, and a truly wonderful addition to the repertory of that most idiosyncratic of 16th-century composers.