Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane

Some things just never go away. And Paul Hillier’s recent short tour with the National Chamber Choir set out to show how this is true of the madrigal. We may all think of the madrigal as an early music phenomenon.

But Hillier’s Madrigalia programme traced its English branch from the 16th century right up to the 20th. The biggest surprise for most music lovers is probably the fact that the madrigal managed to have a marginal existence during the 19th century.

The two Shakespeare settings by George MacFarren (1813-87) were conceived as a kind of sweet and resonant musical doggerel. Well, that's how his Who is Sylvia?and Orpheus, with his Lute sounded after Music Divineby Thomas Tomkins (1572-1656) and Plebs Angelicaby Michael Tippett (1905-98), the Tomkins sounding at the more harmonically complex end of madrigalian undertakings, and the Tippett somehow managing to live as persuasively in the distant past as in the mid-20th century – the piece dates from 1944.

The more familiar end of the madrigal repertoire was represented by Tomkins's Too much I once lamented(exploring what you might call the deeper end of fa-la-la-ing) and his grave When David heard, as well as two madrigals by John Wilbye (1574-1638), Sweet honey-sucking bees and Draw on, sweet night.

By the side of a grove, a glee rather than a madrigal, by William Beale (1784-1854), was performed one to a part by an all-male quintet topped by a counter tenor. The music sounded, well, rather corny, which may explain the composer's ongoing obscurity. But three madrigals by Robert Lucas Pearsall (1795- 1856) – O Ye Roses, Sing we and chant it, and Lay a garland– were archaically splendid, and didn't even fight shy of offering a 19th-century twist on fa-la-la-ing.

The 1914 Milton setting On Timeby Dubliner Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) was forcefully expressed in a way that sounded rich, almost clotted, striving after a kind of harmonic depth that it never quite delivered. Scottish composer Thea Musgrave (born 1926) wrote her Four Madrigalsin 1953 when she was still studying with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. The settings of texts by Thomas Wyatt are at all times sure-footed.

The performances at the Hugh Lane Gallery on Saturday were throughout as good as I have heard from the National Chamber Choir under Hillier: stylish, confident, and verbally acute.