It is common knowledge that the Sollazzo Ensemble that was awarded the contract for recording the entire Leuven Chansonnier on four CDs has only one member in common with what we have here, namely the group’s leader, Anna Danilevskaia. But Danilevskaia’s musicianship is clearly enough defined that there is much in common between the old group and the new.

Now they have completed the 50 songs in the manuscript. As before, they perform certain songs on instruments alone, which seems a pity if they are aiming to record a complete chansonnier (and doubly eccentric in that the booklet contains the full texts of those songs, along with translations into English and Flemish). That Binchois’s Comme femme desconfortee appears purely as an instrumental piece seems to me a serious disservice to one of the most marvellous and saddest songs of the century; but in that case there are now several other thoroughly good recordings.

The fourth disc has in Marie Théoleyre a soprano with rather more vibrato than one is used to for this kind of music, but she has marvellous diction and projects the music wonderfully. She is absolutely sovereign in Morton’s N’araige jamays, more chaotic in the anonymous Aime qui vouldra (partly because there is no possibility that the music was written for those words: in fact a prime case for purely instrumental performance), and less than overwhelming in the last song of the set, En atendant vostre venue, partly, I think, because they take it almost twice as fast as the two earlier recordings of the piece.

For the third disc, the singers Carine Tinney, Andrew Hallock and Jonatan Alvarado serve excellently, but never more than in their truly marvellous performance of Walter Frye’s Tout a par moy. They manage to make this last almost 10 minutes, making it surely the slowest performance of a 15th-century song known to me (Ou beau chastel on the second disc lasts longer, but it is a longer song); and the result is that the singers have massive amounts of space to squeeze every loving detail out of the music. But beyond that they have the flute doubling of Johanna Bartz on the top line, sometimes just doubling but quite a lot of the time playing evidently improvised and plainly quite irrational counterpoints, to absolutely stunning effect. This must count as my favourite track of the decade so far.