The Tallis Scholars/Phillips, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester

A sublime instance of superhuman perfection

Praising the Tallis Scholars is akin to complimenting the Alban Berg Quartet or the Berlin Philharmonic – words become irrelevant when one is faced with such superhuman perfection. Suffice it to say, these leading exponents of Renaissance sacred choral repertoire were on top form in a concert celebrating 30 years of music-making under the direction of their founder Peter Phillips. The programme encompassed some of the genre's "greatest hits": Allegri's Miserere, motets by Palestrina and Thomas Tallis's most magnificent creations – Gaude gloriosa and Spem in alium. The secular context for these religious works was underlined by a stage bestrewn with cabling and festooned with microphones for a live radio broadcast, but, thankfully, the music's divine power was undimmed.

The centrepiece of the concert was a new work, have thee by the hand, O Man, commissioned by the Bridgewater Hall from the Yorkshire composer Robin Walker. Requested to form a companion piece to Spem in alium, it has a claim to being the first 40-part choral work since Tallis's 450-year-old masterpiece. The piece is constructed as a dialogue between God and Man, its text taken from, among other sources, prayers by Archbishop Laud, Bishop Cosin of Durham and the poetry of Pushkin.

The work began with the unaccompanied voice of God: a declamatory statement delivered in English in simple, plainsong-like manner. Man answered in Latin (a deliberately arcane and abstruse response) with hesitant, harmonically insecure phrases, effectively representing the wavering nature of much contemporary religion. The full complement of voices appeared at the words "movebor nec unquam" ("I shall never be moved"), an emotionally powerful moment when the forces' full symphonic possibilities were unleashed in a Wagnerian welter of sonorous, chromatically shifting chords. A prayer for God's love, "Ama me", precipitated another climax, initiating fanfare-like figures in the soprano parts, recalling the roulades at the start of Monteverdi's Vespers. In the final bars, serenity was achieved by the reappearance of God with the reassuring opening words and a closing reference by Man to the creative spirit. The calm and cloudless concluding major chord had the same strong feeling of arrival after a devotional quest as the coda of a Bruckner symphonic adagio.

Robin Walker has risen to the tremendous challenge of sustaining interest in each of the 40 vocal lines over a 12-minute period, crafting a structure of strong formal cohesion, rhythmic vitality and melodic invention. Perhaps most movingly of all, the work seemed to shed new light on its great Renaissance model, which brought the concert to a sublime and spiritually nourishing conclusion.