Right from the start this disc sets out to shake preconceptions. The sleeve information is folded within a kind of dust-jacket – the last place you would expect to find it. It folds out into an uncomfortable document in several colours. None of the texts is translated. The first piece, the motet Pictagore per dogmata, taken at breakneck speed, has the tenor doubled an octave lower, with bizarre consequences for the texture. The next, Solage’s Corps feminin, has a whole chunk sung with just the discantus and contratenor, with results that go against everything known about the musical grammar of the time (only one of its three stanzas is sung). But the most famous oddity of this repertory, Solage’s creepily chromatic Fumeux fume, is made to sound even odder by the use of two groups an octave apart to sing the different strophes, all joining together for the last.

Much is sung with a dreamy quietness (no instruments but often multiple voices on a single line), with ornaments and slides, with relatively little diction. Most of the pieces are cut up into bits in ways that make them hard to understand unless you have the modern edition in front of you. Still, everything is done with considerable precision and there are some superb voices, carefully controlled. Equally, it is clear that a powerful mind has gone to work on trying to see and hear this music in a new way.

The title ‘Cesena’ marks a terrible slaughter on that city by papal troops in 1377. The recording is the soundtrack of an event at the Avignon Festival last summer, in which dancers also participated. This is either a truly innovative approach to the music or a load of pretentious ideas that rather lost their way. I think, probably, a bit of both.