Giulio Caccini was at the epicentre of Florentine musical innovations: extravagant intermedi between the acts of plays produced to celebrate Medici weddings, new-style solo songs and the earliest attempts at opera. All of these aspects are covered in an extraordinary double album devised by Nicolas Achten that draws from Caccini’s books Le nuove musiche (1601/02) and Nuove musiche e nuova maniera di scriverle (1614) and well-chosen miscellanea from scattered sources. Scherzi Musicali also aim to recreate the Caccini family’s renowned music-making: Giulio, his children Pompeo, Francesca and Settimia and his second wife Margherita were nicknamed the ‘Concerto Caccini’; they even went on tour to Paris. The second half showcases songs, motets and duets from Francesca’s Il primo libro delle musiche (1618) and various pieces attributed to Settimia squirrelled away among eclectic Italian manuscript anthologies preserved in Bologna and the Lobkowicz family’s library at Nelahozeves Castle.

Achten is a rare proponent of playing mostly plucked instruments to accompany his own singing. Here he plays two differently tuned chitarroni, a theorbo, colascione, Italian and Spanish guitars, two harps, harpsichord and organ – and others among Scherzi Musicali’s squad of eight players also utilise multiple instruments. Combined with recourse to five other excellent solo singers, there is almost every imaginable combination and configuration from intimacy to opulence.

Achten’s voice takes the limelight at the outset in Piero di Matteo Strozzi’s madrigal ‘Fuor dell’humido nido’, a Medicean panegyric that Giulio Caccini sang as a personification of Night in 1579; it is realised dulcetly by the baritone and a consort of four viols. Achten excels at pessimism about love gone wrong in Caccini’s ‘Alme luci beate’ and maintains subtle shading across more than two octaves of range during the bitterly repentant ‘Io che l’età solea viver nel fango’. Countertenor Andrea Gavagnin sings rapturously in an aria that Caccini designed for his first wife Lucia to perform from a fiery dragon-drawn chariot in the fourth intermedio of La Pellegrina (1589). The larger-scale finale of the opera Il rapimento di Cefalo (1600) alternates contemplative choruses for hunters (featuring 13 additional voices) with three monodies in praise of love that are delivered mellifluously by Achten and tenors Pierre Derhet and Emmanuele Petracco; albeit less than a third of the huge number that Caccini employed, Scherzi Musicali’s forces achieve plentiful sonorities. At the opposite end of the spectrum, there is simplicity of poetic declamation in songs that have just one accompanying instrument: Wei-Lian Huang, supported gently by harp, embellishes deftly in ‘Amarilli, mia bella’ (a version printed by Johan Nauwach, Dresden, 1623), and Gwendoline Blondeel’s gorgeous rendition of ‘Benché sovra le stelle’ is accompanied sympathetically by organ.

Francesca Caccini’s merits are confirmed in mezzo-soprano Isabelle Druet’s vividly impassioned fantasy of Christ’s thoughts as he suffers on the cross (‘Ecco, ch’io verso il sangue’), and Huang’s breathtakingly beautiful account of a prolonged Monteverdian lament (‘Lasciatemi qui solo’). Settimia Caccini’s creativity is represented by Blondeel’s charming love song ‘Due luci ridenti’, Druet’s steelier intensity in ‘Non sò se quel sorriso’ and Derhet’s vociferous outburst in the hemiola-packed canzonetta ‘Lascerò di seguir l’empia e cruda beltà’. After so many fascinating insights, Vladimir Vavilov’s schmaltzy Ave Maria is a strange and other-worldly epilogue.