There seems to be no end to the musical glories of The Eton Choirbook. How fortunate we are that Stephen Darlington and his choir have produced yet another volume in this valuable series. This instalment contains five works dedicated to the Virgin Mary, including the first recording of Walter Lambe’s Gaude Flore Virginali, a text extolling the Virgin’s seven joys. Born in Salisbury about 1451, Lambe became a scholar at Eton in his mid-teens, later working at nearby St George’s Windsor. Notable for having composed the longest piece in the Eton collection, Lambe seems to have been a compositional show-off. His Gaude for four-part men’s voices is written out (so Timothy Symons tells us in his interesting annotations) using unnecessarily complex notational devices.

For all its artifice, Lambe’s setting is dwarfed by a...