The strongest features of this latest recording from The Sixteen are its conception and the performances of Lassus’s music, the composer who links nearly all the works on this programme. His opulent, imaginative Magnificat setting Praeter rerum seriem is based on Josquin’s motet of that name, and one of the surviving sources of Brumel’s 12-voice Mass has annotations apparently in Lassus’s own hand that indicate that he not only knew the work but performed it; his motet Aurora lucis rutilat and its associated Magnificat setting are scored for a nearly equal number of voices.

As I suggest at the start, the High Renaissance finds Harry Christophers (and guest conductor Eamonn Dougan,
who here helped out a sometimes incapacitated Christophers) at his best: the rather full sound that has characterised his ensemble of late yields most in the later 16th century, for which performances by larger forces are more accepted now, and perhaps more widely practised then, than for the earlier. By contrast, the interpretations of Josquin and Brumel strike me as less sure-footed, the former because the choice of overly brisk tempi (especially in the deeply affecting Huc me sydereo, a meditation by Christ himself on the cross) risk skating over the music’s carefully terraced expressions of pathos, and the latter because there isn’t quite the clarity required to hear the 12 voices distinctly at full texture.

I’d wholeheartedly welcome more recordings of the earlier period from this ensemble, not least because their present form and notoriety would help increase the public’s awareness of it; but as performers of Josquin, certainly, they’ve not quite yet hit their stride.