Sigismondo d’India rarely gets the airing he deserves these days, but to confront his work with a response from a contemporary composer is an attractive idea. Daniel d’Adamo takes texts from modern Italian poets (Ungaretti, Sanguinetti and Pasolini – yes, the film-maker) and imbues his music with something of the verbal immediacy of d’India’s stile recitativo. The texts of the modern pieces are frequently elusive, allusive and fragmentary, and d’Adamo’s music plays with similar discontinuities, fragmenting the text and passing it between the singers, a game in which a varied combination of instruments (mostly early, though the flute sounds modern) are also implicated. In this cycle, the shorter pieces work best. In one, a triple harp is used on its own, without singers: thus, an instrument used usually to accompany d’India’s lines steps into the limelight on its own account.

So far so good; the problem is that d’India’s solo madrigals are entrusted to voices that lack the agility or accuracy to carry them off (try “Tu parti, ahi lasso” or “Vostro fui”), and other details of the older music are equally uncertain in effect, such as the flute rendition of the extended “Di quel rosignuolo”. This in turn makes one doubt that the modern pieces are interpreted with quite the precision that the composer may have wished. On the whole, those performances sound more secure, but listening to the intonation at the start of …su nero one isn’t entirely sure. Much as one would wish to welcome this more enthusiastically, both old and new deserve defending with equal conviction.