A hitherto unrecorded Mass by one of the masters of Spanish polyphony? In this age of plenty and surfeit, it hardly seems possible. But Guerrero’s tribute to the old song, and indeed to the eponymous Masses by Morales and Josquin, was the only one of his 19 Mass settings to lie unpublished during his lifetime – perhaps because he was still a teenager, and under the instruction of Morales, when he wrote it in 1545. Passing by Adriano Giardina’s frivolous hypothesis in the booklet-notes that the young composer chose “L’homme armé” because of his own warrior’s name, I’d suggest that Guerrero already had a highly developed sense of history, and perhaps of his place in it. The short four-voice motet Virgo prudentissima (published in 1555, by which time Guerrero was all of 26) encapsulates both his precociously formed, daringly proleptic style and the exciting sense of personal engagement about these one-per-part performances.

He and his fellow Iberians have not been treated to an intimate approach on record nearly so often as their northern counterparts such as Gombert and Lassus; by itself, La Sestina’s recording, in a Swiss Reform Church, is a welcome redress of such imbalance and shows that amplitude of neither resources nor acoustic is required to let this music breathe and sing. A previous disc of one-voice-per-part Guerrero by Musica Ficta (from the Enchiriadis label; available on Spotify, as is La Sestina’s album) suffers from wonky balance, wobbly tuning and washy acoustic. This does not. La Sestina’s throatier, plangent timbres, edgy phrasing and soloistic approach are all the more to the point in a selection of seven sacred madrigals published in 1589. O Virgen, quand’os miro is a highlight, in which La Sestina’s tangily articulated, teasing relish of its tripping rhythms and vernacular style takes us a world away from the impersonal grandeur of the better-known Battle Mass and its (mostly English) recordings.