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Candida Thompson’s performance of Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel with understated beauty, immaculate phrasing and restrained emotion, steals the show.

The Bergen Phil and the Edvard Grieg Choir trace music from Elizabethan themes to 20th century works on them, culminating in Pärt's Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten.

The Sixteen enchant the audience in Sydney with an intelligently-created programme of British composers.

Some of England’s greatest choral music dates from the period of political and religious upheaval during the late 15th to early 17th centuries, when composers were having to adapt to new monarchs and changes to the church service almost as frequently as they would have changed their shirts.

The Sixteen’s three appearances in the line-up for this year’s Spitalfields Music Festival showcase the breadth of their repertoire. On June 15 and 16, they will premiere Alan Roth’s new musical setting of Beckett monologues, Old Earth. First, on June 9, was something altogether more familiar.

I wasn’t sure, at first, how it would feel to listen to sacred Renaissance works in St. David’s Hall, a modern, secular concert hall. I wasn’t convinced that the beauty of these pieces and the compositional effects, so suited to the vaulted lofts of a cathedral, would carry over when so far removed from their original context.