Thankfully, the generation of composers born c1500 need no longer be described as “lost”: with recordings like this appearing with increasing frequency, its achievements become easier to appreciate. Equally, this much-lauded French ensemble does their growing reputation no harm by adding a Spanish successor to their Italian and English discs. Of the works on offer here, it is perhaps Morales’s motets that are the more immediately striking. A few have been recorded before but hardly as eloquently as here. Each one is in its own way a gem. The Mass is perhaps less easy to approach, even if you already know the famous plainchants on which it is based – or perhaps precisely for that very reason: the memory of many other well known settings sometimes threatens to crowd out Morales’s own. After a few hearings, the problem rights itself, and he soon speaks on his own behalf.

Ensemble Jachet de Mantoue is pretty nearly on top form here, even if this recording doesn’t quite match the sumptuous impression they made on their previous disc of early Elizabethan English music. That its edge is at all dulled may be due to a curious feature of the sound recording. The voices have clearly been recorded very close up, but the ambient sound is also very present, so much so as nearly to overwhelm them whenever they dip below a certain dynamic threshold. The resulting loss of detail is a shame, considering what fine singing this is: a beautiful sound, certainly, but less might have been more.