The Sixteen/Dougan/Russill, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

It was found in 1977 on a Suffolk farm where it had evidently served as a dairy door: a large square of wood pierced with curious grooves and holes. Eventually it was identified as an organ soundboard of the 16th century from which time, thanks to the Reformation and Puritanism, no English organ survives intact. Soon another soundboard was found in Suffolk, offering vital information, and the Early English Organ Project was underway.

So here, on the stage of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, stood the results: a small one-manual organ with wooden pipes painted in heraldic colours and issuing bright, flute-like tones; and a larger instrument based on the original Suffolk find, with gothic casework, metal pipes and stronger, more reedy stops. Neither had pedals, but both had attendants plying their bellows in stately motions. Between them glided that eloquent organist Patrick Russill, while eight men from The Sixteen under Eamonn Dougan periodically interspersed plainchants and liturgical polyphony such as Tallis's strikingly austere "Veni, Redemptor gentium".

The programme was neatly devised to conduct us through the English 16th century, from the early decades when John Redford presided at the organ of Old St Paul's to the more private, recusant activities of William Byrd at the end of the reign of Elizabeth. Most of the organ items comprised vigorous contrapuntal fantasias on liturgical chants: plain and bold from Redford, more elaborate from a mid-16th-century figure such as John Blitheman - we heard two fine workings-out of the "In Nomine" plainchant - and reaching their apogee in the ecstatic flights of Byrd's Fancie: For my Ladye Nevell (in C), tellingly programmed between the poignant "Kyrie" and "Agnus Dei" from his Mass for Four Voices.

Not all of this revelatory programme, offered to what turned out to be a large and receptive audience, was so sacred. A variety of secular pieces, songs and dances survive arranged for organ in the Mulliner Book, copied out in the 1560s for his own purposes by the organist John Mulliner at a time when the organ was dropping out of church use. From among these, Russill included a pert little number entitled "La bounette" - at which point a couple of windmill-like attachments at the top of the larger organ began to revolve. No historical explanation was to be found in the programme notes for this naughty phenomenon.