I am enormously fond of a good programme concept and this debut album from early music ensemble Fount & Origin offers ‘a musical meditation on the Franco-Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden’s altarpiece image of The Last Judgement at the End of Time’. This multipanelled work in the genre known quaintly as ‘doom’ hung in a hospice to urge patients towards last-minute repentance. As visual art could persuade, so people believed that listening to polyphony, even if you couldn’t sing it yourself, also offered a pathway to salvation. Thus, nine 15th-century polyphonic works trace themes and characters in the painted panels and form a solid musical arc bookended by Requiem movements.

The majority of these works are sung alternatim: that is, alternate verses of plainsong and polyphony. From the outset James Tomlinson establishes a gentle pace that brings out the mesmeric qualities of this music, and this is further enhanced by the warm, spacious acoustic. The opening track, Johannes Ockeghem’s Domine Jesu Christe showcases the rich, low-pitch sound of these voices, balancing tight ensemble and clarity with beauty of line. Three features are particularly worthy of note: the arc of the programme itself, peaking with the joyful and sonorous Exultet celum laudibus (Anon) and comforting with the sublime Urbs beata Jerusalem; the carefully aligned vowels of the singers (listen to the opening of Ut queant laxis, for example); and finally, the splendid phrasing of the top line shared by altos Guy James and Joy Sutcliffe. In Clare sanctorum senatus in particular, Sutcliffe’s steady tone reminds me of Margaret Philpot’s many outstanding performances with Gothic Voices.

The highlight for me is the Kyrie from Johannes Regis’s confident Missa L’homme armé/Dum sacrum mysterium. The vocal beauty and the subtlety of the performance signal a debut of note.