As a special encore, the King’s Singers give a superb performance of Paul Drayton’s Masterpiece, a musical satire on four hundred years of Western music in nine minutes, with sections ranging from a fugue on the name “Johann Sebastian Bach” to an impressionistic rendering of “Debussy” in fanatically over-pronounces French.

2005 is the 500th Anniversary of the birth of Thomas Tallis, the most influential English composer of his generation, as well as one of the most popular renaissance composers of today. The King’s Singers recently recorded Tallis’s famous forty-part motet, Spem in alium. How does a six-member ensemble perform this piece? All is revealed in sequences interspersed between the concert performances that show the singers at work solving this problem. The programme culminates with the ensemble’s remarkable rendition of this magnificent setting.