It takes great confidence in yourself as a performer to be able to walk out on stage and begin your program while the audience is still sitting down, shuffling around and even talking, as the King’s Singers did at the start of their concert in Finney Chapel last Friday night. Such an action implies an attitude that the concert must be conducted on the performer’s terms. One must demonstrate that the audience must accommodate for the program; the ensemble does not have to accommodate the audience.

The King’s Singers, whose concert formed the fourth installment in this year’s Artist Recital Series, have every right to be confident in themselves as performers. The six British men who make up the group have superb voices. They sing together with perfect intonation and excellent dynamic control, making undoubtedly difficult music sound effortless. Most importantly though, they are masters at keeping their audience entertained.

And that’s just it. Perhaps this reporter is nothing but a grouchy snob, but the concert felt like high quality entertainment, not art.

The program was, on the whole, mediocre. R. Murray Shafer’s “Tristan and Iseult,” a setting of the Tristan myth in translation written for the King’s Singers, seemed too long and directionless. Perhaps this was a shortcoming of trying to set a prose text rather than poetry. Cyrillus Kreek’s “Four Estonian Psalms” were also unimpressive.

Best on the program were five madrigals by various British Renaissance composers written in honor of Queen Elizabeth I. The King’s Singers’ collective sound fit the pieces well, and their thoughtful performance reached an artistic level not met elsewhere during the evening.

The selections from Francis Poulenc’s “Chansons Française” were wonderful, fun compositions, but the singers’ performance of them was, as it were, entirely too British. Their dry English demeanor worked well for them when they spoke between pieces about what was coming next.

Every straight-faced explanation of the rather comical, even lewd texts being sung drew a hearty laugh from the audience. The talking between songs made up for the scant program notes and lack of printed translations, but it became clear that perhaps the program notes were deliberately left scant and the translations were deliberately omitted so that the singers could earn laughs for their deliveries — a rather cheap trick.

Their closing set featured arrangements of popular songs under the heading “Love Songs” contained many more cheap tricks. Louis Armstrong impressions, kissing noises, one of the countertenors singing “Yesterday” lyric “I’m not half the man I used to be,” in his unnaturally high voice, and the inevitable breaking out of the kazoos all had the audience in hysterics, but again, they were witnessing entertainment, not art.

This would have been fine had the concert not been billed as part of a series of recitals by “Artists.” The King’s Singers are brilliant entertainers, but they failed to demonstrate their artistry.