It’s quite a year for musical anniversaries, one of which has a strong Oxford connection. Thirty years ago this year, Harry Christophers (pictured) left Magdalen College Choir, and founded his own group, originally of 16 singers. To celebrate its 30th birthday, The Sixteen has just embarked on a nationwide Choral Pilgrimage, and one of the first places to be visited was the University Church – most appropriately, since this now world-famous choir began life just a few hundred yards up the road.

Two more anniversaries were celebrated in a programme devoted to Purcell, born 350 years ago, and James MacMillan, who reaches his 50th birthday this year. At first sight they make strange bedfellows, but The Sixteen convincingly demonstrated that the two composers do in fact complement one another. Opening with two Purcell motets, Jehova, quam multi sunt hostes, and Miserere mei, The Sixteen showed how clever Purcell was at serving two masters at once – God, and the listening audience down on earth. The following anthem Remember not, Lord, our offences added a touch of melancholy to its penitential mood.

James MacMillan’s religious music doesn’t so much modernise the past as build upon it. The devotional O bone Jesu, for instance, is a setting of an anonymous 16th-century text, and employs MacMillan’s trademark, die-away and dissonant passages, that seemed to be left floating in the air before a resounding final request was reached: “O Jesus, permit me to enter into thy kingdom, sweet Jesus.” Two extracts from The Strathclyde Motets added a Celtic tang to MacMillan’s Roman Catholic roots.

Harry Christophers and The Sixteen deliver performances that are an extraordinarily skilful blend of meticulous scholarship and sheer musicality. Using an 18-strong choir with female sopranos but male altos, the sound completely avoids any hint of academic dryness. Ending with a build-up of complex choral textures in Purcell’s Funeral Sentences for Queen Mary, this was a superb concert.