Last year, Harry Christophers and the Sixteen toured the cathedrals of Britain on their regular Choral Pilgrimage, using Victoria's great 1605 Requiem as the centrepiece of a programme of works from the Spanish Renaissance. They are about to embark on this year's tour - but first, the group made a final glance back to the music from the golden age of the Iberian peninsula in the 17th and early 18th centuries.

The programme, entitled Streams of Tears, focused on music composed for the Lenten liturgy. In that era, the Spanish and Portuguese empires had carved up central and south America between them, and so there was music from the New World in the Sixteen's programme, too. One of the composers who featured most prominently in this concert, Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla, was born in Málaga and became choirmaster at the cathedral of Puebla, the second city of the Spanish colony in Mexico. His settings of Deus in Adiutorium and Mirabilia Testimonia Tua framed the first half, which also contained works by Melgas and one by Fernando de Almeida: Maundy Thursday, settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Padilla's more substantial and supremely beautiful Pater Peccavi, suitably penitential and luxuriating in its passing dissonances, began the second.

With 20 voices, supported by an instrumental trio of theorbo, harp and organ, the choral sounds were wonderfully clear and unfailingly precise - though those gains in clarity were offset by the lack of the appropriate spatial effects and haloes of resonance that a church acoustic might have supplied. In the Stabat Mater by the Italian-born Domenico Scarlatti, who was the biggest musical signing by the Portuguese court of Joao V in 1719, the ever-increasing rhythmic energy of the music, which erupts so exuberantly in the final Amen, showed that Christophers' group can be just as impressively extrovert as they had been austerely restrained.