I don’t know why, but among ‘early’ musicians, it always seems to be viol players who are the most willing to extend their repertoire with newly-composed pieces. Fretwork is not the only established viol consort to have commissioned new works (though not many of them are yet available on disc), and now Paolo Pandolfo brings us an hour’s worth of his own compositions for viola da gamba. In this case, the passage from Baroque to modern is easy enough to explain, since Pandolfo, a jazz bassist before he took up the gamba, has always been a ready improviser, and, as he reveals in the booklet-notes, many of the pieces on this disc have their origins in the instrumental musings with which he has found solace in the lonely hotel rooms that are the musician’s lot.

It is this, indeed, that gives the music its flavour and eloquence: on the one hand, many of the figurations – drones, broken chords, double-stops, plucked notes, wiry dissonances – you find in Marais and Sainte-Colombe, drawn from the gamba’s soul; and on the other they are deeply personal responses to the victims of the Iraq war (on both sides, in Baghdad’s Spring and Prairies), the plight of the asylum-seeker (Albanese, written by Paolo’s trumpet-playing brother Andrea) or the dreamings of a sleeping child (Nana Bobò).

Thus the music is not complex, relying less on formal organisation and harmonic density than on moments of tension and release and on the quality of instrumental sound – tellingly augmented by the emotively Italian-folky voice of Laura Polimeno and the occasional distant bomb-blast from percussionist Álvaro Garrido.

Like jazz, it makes its appeal directly to the senses, and whether or not you like it is liable to depend on your reaction to the particular soundworld of the gamba rather than your feelings about Baroque or modern music. One thing is certain though: Pandolfo is a musician of touching humanity.