Martin Peerson’s ‘Mottects or Grave Chamber Musique’ (1630) contains five-part songs on poems from Caecilia by Sir Fulke Greville (the 1st Baron Brooke, former Chancellor of the Exchequer and lord of Warwick Castle); there is also a lament for the poet, recently murdered by an embittered servant. These ‘motets’ are not remotely liturgical: Greville’s poetry hints at eroticism and yearning but worldliness is ultimately rejected in favour of Calvinist-infused metaphors. All pieces are accompanied by viols and an organ part with figured bass – the earliest-known of its type printed in England.

All these elements are tailor-made for I Fagiolini, Fretwork and James Johnstone. The collective consort is deftly balanced and instantly responsive to every nuance in Peerson’s emotive word-setting, and descriptive characteristics in the music are further emphasised by the singers’ use of historical English pronunciation. Fretwork’s shaded five-part viols accord pride of place to fulsome singing in this pristine recording, made at York’s National Centre for Early Music; the richest semi-independent instrumental texture is the accompaniment to the elegy ‘Where shall a sorrow’, led vividly by baritone soloist Greg Skidmore. The tripartite ‘Love, the delight of all well-thinking minds’ requires not only exquisite dissonances at its broadest moments but also conversational intimacy as the poem progresses to raise the subject of time and mortality. There is playful sarcasm in the buoyant ‘Cupid, my prettie boy, leave off thy crying’ and convivial humour in ‘Was ever man so matcht with boy?’, but darker chromatic twists of richly woven polyphony are never far away (the plangent ‘Self-pitties teares’).