The Truth from Above is the title the Sixteen have given their Christmas offering this year, taking the words from the carol Vaughan Williams heard in Herefordshire a century ago and went on to set for choir. It was with this gently understated arrangement that the Sixteen began, following it immediately with Josquin des Prez's setting of the hymn to the virgin Mary, Praeter Rerum Seriem, its fast-moving contrapuntal web contrasting brilliantly with the Vaughan Williams.

Juxtaposing traditional carols, arranged by 20th-century English composers, with early Flemish composers was one strand of the evening's sequence; singing different settings of the same texts afforded another connecting thread. Thus Orlando de Lassus's Magnificat, Praeter Rerum Seriem, was heard to pay homage to Josquin in its liberal quotation of his setting, with the Sixteen maximising the effect of Lassus's alternation of flowing plainchant with elaborate polyphony. It did indeed sound magnificent.

The combination of austere beauty and quirky pulse in the Coventry Carol was set against Kenneth Leighton's piece using the same words. Leighton's focus on Herod's massacre of the first-born brought a piercing drama to its heart before returning to the main lullaby. Three and half centuries earlier, William Byrd had sought a similar balance of expressive means in his Lullaby, My Sweet Little Baby and the poise with which conductor Harry Christophers invested the singing made it most memorable.

Yet the sequence wasn't on such an elevated level that the Sixteen weren't allowed to relax a little in a sequence of encores. It opened with the lilting Quem Pastores Laudavere and closed with Ding Dong Merrily on High, but it was the addition of the rhythm of tambourines to the early, celebratory Gaudete that lent a lively medieval vibrancy.

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