The Sixteen’s Christmas tour has established itself as an unmissable date on the Advent calendar. This year’s programme celebrates the feast of the Epiphany: plainsong and Renaissance motets featured alongside traditional and more recent carols, all loosely interwoven to create what felt like a time-travelling set of variations on the theme of the Magi’s visit to the infant Jesus. As always, it was the Sixteen’s clarity of diction and the shades of expressive colour that director Harry Christophers brought to the interpretations that beguiled the ear. JH Hopkins Jr’s We Three Kings may have been an obvious choice, but the words “sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying, sealed in the stone-cold tomb” are rarely delivered with such pianissimo chill.
Of the Latin motets, Palestrina’s Videntes Stellam Magi stood out for the sense of wonder realised in the central passage when the wise men first see the infant with Mary. The music seeming to linger magically here and again at the end as they offer their gifts, aurum, thus et myrrhum. Sheppard’s Reges Tharsis had biting dissonances that contrasted sharply with Palestrina’s setting of the same text; that of Lassus – the second part of his Omnes de Saba – gained a joyous lightness in its melismatic Alleluias.
Herbert Howells’s Long, Long Ago was a heartfelt plea for peace, with James Bassi’s jazz-inflected Quem Pastores Laudavere adding a gentle contemporary note, before the Sixteen’s final blaze in Anerio’s eight-part Magnificat.
• At Shoreditch Town Hall, London on 5 December. Box office: 020-7377 1362. At Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham, on 8 December. Box office: 0115-989 5555. Then touring.
