This latest addition to Guerrero’s discography is especially to be welcomed for his fine Mass on a motet by Thomas Crecquillon, in which one hears echoes of the style of Guerrero’s near-direct contemporary, Palestrina. Like its model it is a joyful, extrovert piece, to which Andrew Carwood’s singers respond with an equal measure of buoyancy and vigour. Whether this marks the beginning of a longer-term engagement with Spanish music or an interlude between The Cardinall’s Musick’s Byrd project and something nearly as ambitious, time will tell. My only reservation concerns the manner in which the tempo gradually accelerates in the latter part of the Gloria. Perhaps this is a new take on the old custom of adopting a faster tempo after a slower “Qui tollis” section (usually at “Quoniam tu solus sanctus”), but it feels no less staged (dare I say, “conducted”) for being gradual, and it may not be to everyone’s taste. David Trendell did the same thing on his recent recording of Rogier’s Missa Ego sum qui sum on the same label.

A selection of motets, performed one-to-a-part, rounds off the disc logically (for a Marian theme pervades throughout), though the Marian antiphons have by now been recorded many times before. Here one may prefer the more incisive renditions of La Colombina (K617, 9/07), but the centrepiece is doubtless the Mass, and anyone interested in the siglo de oro will regard this as essential listening.