All-female vocal ensembles are an increasingly visible feature of the early music scene. In the UK there’s Musica Secreta, in America Anonymous Four, and in Denmark, Trio Medieval. The duo of Patrizia Bovi and Gilberte Casabianca here offer an intriguing – and highly persuasive – programme. Behind the evocative short title there lies a more musicologically informed impulse: Bovi and Casabianca follow the ‘traces of oral tradition in Italian manuscripts of the 14th and 15th centuries’. This ties in with the experiences of both singers, which includes membership of several Italian ensembles, and an association with the Centre de la Voix at Royaumont, a research centre spearheaded by Marcel Pérès and his Ensemble Organum.

This ‘wing’ of the early music movement has always been concerned with the way in which surviving folkloristic and regional traditions (most of them improvised or orally transmitted) can be used to illuminate the performance practice of early polyphony – especially in the case of repertories with a strong popular element, such as the laude. The starting-point of such hypotheses is necessarily speculative, but far from glossing over this feature, Bovi’s introductory text frankly acknowledges, indeed, embraces it. And anyone who has heard the semi-improvised music, say, of the monks of Mediterranean islands, will know where these musicians are coming from (literally: Casabianca is Corsican). So the style of vocal delivery, of ornamental inflections, will also be instantly familiar. And one can agree with the logic of this approach, in so far as the written sources they use were clearly intended as supports for performance, being simple, often note-for-note.

The proof of such speculation, of course, must be the performance itself, and on this count Bovi and Casabianca acquit themselves very persuasively. Not only are their vocal timbres distinctive and characterful; they distinguish well between the different sorts of repertoire on this recording: laude, traditional pieces of popular origin, both sacred and secular (the two orally transmitted settings of the Stabat mater text – one Sicilian, the other Corsican – make for instructive comparison), and mostly anonymous polyphonic ballatas and caccias. The polyphonic pieces can be sung quite straight (like the concluding ‘E vatende segnor mio’ from the Codex Reina), but the traditional pieces are sung with abandon, the inflections effortless and fluent (they would be ideal transcription material for student ethno-musicologists!). At such times the singers’ timbre is positively bracing, like a Corsican cheese: it won’t be to everybody’s taste, though I must say I’d gladly have had seconds.