It was hard to believe the sound produced by the Tallis Scholars actually came from earthly bodies.

Close your eyes and you could visualise a cloud of angels, complete with haloes, hovering somewhere up in the rafters.

Open them again and it still seemed the choir were pouring out their seamless blend of notes with no effort at all.

In fact it takes fearsome breath control and unshakeable technique to keep the lines of sacred Renaissance polyphony clean and precise.

Polyphony basically means the different sections of the choir all sing separate, interweaving strands of melody.

It can very easily turn into a blurry soup of sound as the overlapping words and notes collide but the Scholars' mastery of pitch and diction let every thread shine clear.

The programme moved from the Sistine Chapel with Allegri's Miserere to 16th Century Spain with the solemn Victoria Requiem.

The choir took the showpiece Miserere with pace, adding some even more showy ornamentation around the soaring top Cs.

Palestrina's motet Tu Es Petrus was the glorious finale, with the singer's voices rich as molten gold.

Forget the angels, the Scholars made sacred music sound almost too heavenly to be good for you.