The title ‘Nuove musiche’ is sure to outrage early music purists but there’s nothing ‘new’ here unless it’s a recognition or a revealing of the imagination’s role in reconciling the study of historic performance practice with the art of the contemporary musician. After all, every interpretation is an improvisation – it’s just a matter of degree.

So fans of L’Arpeggiata’s ‘All’Improvviso’ (Alpha, 12/04) will find themselves on familiar territory here. Rolf Lislevand and friends embark on an elaboration of Baroque forms such as the passacaglia and toccata while incorporating more modern styles that seemed to grow naturally out of the nature of both music and instruments: Kapsberger gets a vocalise courtesy of Arianna Savall; Pellegrini gets a stylish Nuevo Flamenco treatment; Frescobaldi’s beautiful ‘Così mi disprezzate’ gets double-bass and guitar solos. The expansion and contraction of arranged and improvised elements allows the original Baroque material to breathe authentically in our own time, resulting in a phantasmagoria whose haunting effects are only accentuated by ECM’s beautifully spacious recording. Lislevand’s playing is endlessly inventive; Arianna Savall’s voice is angelic, her performance of the Frescobaldi heart-rending; Thor-Harald Johnsen on chitarra battente and Bjørn Kjellemyr on bass are also superb. Pedro Estevan’s percussion, Marco Ambrosini’s nyckelharp (keyed fiddle) and Guido Morini’s keyboards further add to the rich textures.

In his booklet-notes Lislevand talks about playing around with the modernist elements of Kapsberger’s and Piccinini’s toccatas but a kind of disciplined postmodern sensibility seems to pervade these arrangements more than anything else. Let the ECM New Series tag serve as a warning – this disc rocks, albeit urbanely.