Any album described as a beautiful blend of Britain's best-loved choir and a chart-topping Japanese guitarist puts me on high alert for taste infringement.
Into the Light, a collaboration between the Sixteen and Kaori Muraji, Japan's own Nymph of the Guitar, confirmed my suspicions.
For 25 years, theSixteen have devoted themselves to the great music of the English and European Renaissance. If they had recorded nothing else, their albums of pieces from the 16th century Eton Choirbook would assure them a place in the choral pantheon.
Alas, conductor Harry Christophers has been bitten by the crossover bug and the group's latest album is not a cause for celebration.
For sceptics, a programme note explaining the journey behind Into the Light would not have been amiss.
It has been claimed, for example, that a guitar obbligato is acceptable in some of the 16th-century material because some early manuscripts admit a lutenist to the ensemble.
However, compare the two sections of Victoria's Alma Redemptoris Mater and see which you prefer - the first, with a bleak soprano solo over guitar, or the second, in which the full a cappella group flexes its considerable choral muscles.
Solo singing too often sounds emotionally pinched, Eamonn Dougan's bass solo in Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Procesion is a case in point. One bizarre track has Johan Pachelbel's Canon - a rather overexposed piece at the best of times - set to the words of Oscar Wilde's Requiescat. Two others feature Villa-Lobos guitar preludes, weighed down with stodgy choral descants by Bob Chilcott, using John Dowland poems that are so much catchier in their original settings.
If you survive to the final track, Borodin's Polovtsian Dances sung to words from Shakespeare's The Tempest ("Our revels now are ended"), you may think, as I did, that these people's ideas of revels would hardly pass muster in the times of Shakespeare and the Tudor set.
It's enough to have you searching desperately for your old LP of Kismet, where the Russian composer's music is graced by the lyrics of Stranger in Paradise and delivered by the robust baritone of Vic Damone.
* The Sixteen and Kaori Muraji, Into the Light (Deutsche Grammophon 475 8199)
