The King’s Singers mark their 40th anniversary this year. In London their first celebratory concert was devoted to music of the Spanish Renaissance, and reviewing in The Times Hilary Finch noted that in the second half “the riot of music and mime” caused visiting Spaniards “to jump out of their seats with joy”. This CD gives us the first half.

And there are no laughs here. The mood is penitential, the programme a sequence of laments. The text from Job, “Versa est in luctum” (“My harp is turned to mourning”), is heard in four settings, the most inspired being probably the one by Alonso Lobo, whose Lamentations is the longest work included and whose Libera me seems the most intense. The opening hymn, Crux fidelis, with music by King John IV of Portugal, is the most serene in character, so that the programme passes like a procession in Holy Week from that quiet beginning to the fierce declamation of the Lobo’s “Dies illa, dies irae”.

The famous group exercise from the start that extraordinary communal ear which takes care of intonation, blend, clarity of diction and finesse of shading. Characteristic (in this music at least) is the elimination of vibrato while managing to avoid that assertive ironed-out tone which often goes with it. In homophonic passages, as at the beginning of Crux fidelis, they come too near to the “electronic” tone for my liking, and, when playing the motets of the Portuguese composer Melgas in a recording by Pro Cantione Antiqua (Hyperion, 11/94), I prefer that group’s more resonant singing. Still, this is (as Hilary Finch also said) a feast of “sublime lamentation”, and, as a birthday offering, is distinguished by a fine austerity such as might have pleased Philip II himself.