In Echo have been assembled by cornettist Gawain Glenton from mainstays of the English Cornett & Sackbut Ensemble, Florilegium, Fretwork, the Taverner Players, I Fagiolini and the Bach Players. Their debut album explores music associated with the Hanseatic League of cities dotted around the North Sea and the Baltic. Almost all works are by little-known authors active in the 17th century, and the eclectic choices have been sequenced intelligently to cultivate a well-paced variety of textures, moods, styles and shifting combinations of instruments.

A few pieces feature five or more players, such as a beguiling sonata of sonorous depth by Antonio Bertali that highlights rapier-like interplay between Glenton, Emily White (sackbut) and Bojan Čičic´ (violin). Blink and you will miss a tiny sorrowful piece by Schütz’s younger cousin Heinrich Albert, followed without pause by Johann Sommer’s pavan based on Lassus’s chanson ‘Susanne un jour’. At the smaller end of the scale, Lübeck-born Thomas Baltzar’s solo violin variations on ‘John come kiss me now’ is played with consummate skill by Čičic´. Glenton and White deliver impeccable divisions and a kaleidoscope of colours in a substantial sonata by the itinerant Hamburger Dietrich Becker. Silas Wollston provides a judicious account of a pavan by Melchior Schildt based on Dowland’s famous tune from Lachrimae (both musicians were employed at the court of Danish king Christian IV), which leads into Anthony Holborne’s exquisite pavan The Image of Melancholly played beautifully by cornett and four-part strings.

The inquisitive ensemble has also commissioned Andrew Keeling’s new work Northern Soul, organised into four ‘walks’ inspired by the composer’s rambles around the Lake District; the extraordinary timbres of a newly built reconstruction of a rare English Renaissance organ emerge to the forefront and the cumulative effect seems as if slithers of Gabrieli, Messiaen and King Crimson converge on a fairground ride.