Gautier de Coincy (d1236) is one of those odd figures in the history of music who may not have been a composer at all. Most of his known songs have melodies that appear earlier elsewhere; so his importance is perhaps more as a man who adapted existing music for his own purposes and particularly as a medium for his poetry.

So it could be said immediately that the comparison recording by the French group Alla Francesca gives more sense of Gautier’s poetry: for example, nobody who has heard that disc will forget Emmanuel Bonnardot singing Ma viële to his own viele accompaniment, ever so simply but movingly. In the new recording the New London Consort most often repeat each line or pair of lines: they have good musical reasons for doing that, but it does mean that the texts make rather less impact as poems.

On the other hand, they always sing all the surviving text for each song they do, whereas Alla Francesca chop and change, selecting just a few stanzas and even performing five of the songs as instrumental pieces. For example, the Consort allow Entendez tuit ensemble to last more than 20 minutes (and they almost manage to keep it alive, despite all those repetitions) whereas Alla Francesca cut it down to three stanzas and despatch it in under five minutes: perhaps it means that interested musicians will want both, to have a basis for wondering what actually matters in this music.

With that said, the New London Consort are fully up to their normal standards of exceptional skill. Philip Pickett has chosen to do the music with a group of nine singers (three woman and six men), which he deploys in all kinds of different and inventive ways in the course of the disc. Occasionally the size and energy of the group can make them sound a little ponderous, again by comparison with the intimacy of Alla Francesca, though they certainly grab the music by the scruff of the neck. This is spirited musicianship, only slightly marred by a booklet note that for half its length mimics the New Grove article, sentence by sentence.

But for anybody who knows the work of the New London Consort, this disc will be a particularly moving experience because it begins with gittern (short-necked lute) playing by Tom Finucane, who died of tuberculosis very suddenly this summer. Many times in the course of the disc one marvels at his peerless musicianship; and in the duets with the harp of Frances Kelly one can hear the results of more than 20 years making music together. We shall miss Tom badly.