Laughing longest, anyway. It’s not over yet. I’m halfway though my career, so we will wait to see what happens in the future. So far our attitude has paid off. That’s to say, it’s a durable attitude and the great strength is there is so much good music to do. I’ve got 200 years of music, across all of Europe, and fortunately the good name of the group means that I can put forward composers who no one has heard of. We can attract an audience because it’s the Tallis Scholars doing the music. Then, of course, a composer like Gombert or Cardoso becomes more famous in their own right, which is ideal.

Who are the composers deserving of resurrection?

It used to be all about high Renaissance music: Palestrina, Victoria, Lassus, Tallis and in England, Gibbons, Tomkins and Weelkes. Now it’s about Josquin, Guerrero and going earlier, Ockeghem, Dufay and Dunstable. I think the composers I would mention are Nicholas Gombert, Clemens Non Papa, and in the English school John Sheppard, Robert White and Christopher Tye. These are the composers who appeal most to me. There are also so many Spanish, Portuguese and South American composers yet to discover, and each one deserves a disc to themselves.

How do you decide what to perform in concert or what to record? Why this Victoria mass versus that one?

It’s a mixture of possible circumstances. If a festival where we’re performing has a theme, then I’ll try to fit with the theme. That might encourage me to find a new piece; I’m always on the lookout for new things. I don’t want the singers to get stuck in a rut. I don’t want us to become known for only performing Allegri’s Miserere. I might have just heard a lovely recording of a Victoria mass by the Westminster Cathedral Choir and want to do it myself. Or a scholar may come to me with an edition he just made and ask, “What do you think of this?” and I’ll take it on. The Tallis Scholars library has nearly 800 sets of copies in it. In 26 years we’ve sung that many different pieces.

Do you prefer to try out what you’re planning to record in live performance before making the recording?