The Music at St Peter's season continued last Saturday with a wonderful a capella recital by the Choir of Worcester College, in a programme that encompassed a range of madrigals and devotional music from the mid-16th century up to the late 20th century. The first half was devoted to composers from the Elizabethan age, illustrating just what a prolific musical period it was. The main focus was Byrd's Mass in Four Voices, which formed a framework around which was slotted sacred music by Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Weelks and the little-known Robert Parsons, who drowned at the age of 33, just as he was on the cusp of a flourishing London career. Who knows what he might have achieved had he lived.

Byrd intended that the main sections of his Mass should be interspersed with contrasting sacred songs by other composers, so it was good to hear the college choir performing it to this original structure, allowing the full complexities of Byrd's counterpoint to be highlighted. Under the alternating conducting of Tom Primrose and Dan Chambers, the singers coped with the diverse styles with calm effortlessness, making light of the virtuosic demands made of them. Occasionally, there were some slightly forced sounds from the sopranos in the upper register, which set the eardrums rattling a little, but otherwise the choir produced a consistently clear, full and melodious sound, helped not a little by the sparkling acoustics of St Peter's.

The second half leapt forward nearly 400 years, with music by Rubbra, Britten, Walton, Bairstow, Finzi and Leighton. With Britten's Hymn to the Virgin and Walton's Litany, the choir was in fairly familiar territory, but it was good to hear them tackle lesser-known pieces, too, such as Kenneth Leighton's Missa Brevis and Sir Edward Bairstow's I sat down under his shadow. And every piece, familiar or not, was never anything less than a stirring experience.