The last disc devoted to Jacobus Clemens I listened to was The Tallis Scholars’ recording of his Mass Pastores, quidnam vidistis and an assortment of motets (Gimell, 1/91R). The Brabant Ensemble follow a similarly shrewd formula, except that the Mass is based on a motet of Clemens’ own. My earlier impression was of an able and fluent composer – but one lacking in toughness.

They came flooding back with this disc. What’s wrong with Clemens? Try the Credo, where he deploys an ostinato phrase in tandem between the top two voices. It’s a stock cadential gesture, the simplest thing in the world, and it’s drawn from a readily identifiable place in the motet, so he may have been consciously making a point; but the joke (if such it is) soon wears thin, and by the end of the Credo I was heartily fed up.

To be fair, the motets offer considerably more variety, textually and texturally speaking; although they are all for five voices, between them they present all the four possible doublings of the basic SATB texture. In Job tonso capite, Clemens strikes a darker note; everywhere else the music exudes a genial aura. The performances are secure and fluent enough, in the Oxbridge choral tradition, without ever quite taking off. In pitching the music where he has, Stephen Rice strains his sopranos uncomfortably in the upper reaches (for example at plus ultra – ‘yet more!’ – at the conclusion of Carole magnus eras, an instance of word-painting mentioned in the sleeve-note, but which fails to clear the bar in performance). On another day, and with a different composer perhaps, they will be more convinced, and sound more convincing.