If you visit the Palazzo Colonna in Rome to admire Annibale Carracci’s remarkable The Bean Eater, along the same wall to its right there is Tintoretto’s portrait of Adrian Willaert seated at a spinet with Venice in the background. The Flemish musician was maestro di cappella at St Mark’s for 35 years (1527 62) but nowadays his works are published, performed and recorded less often than they deserve. Tenor and director Tore Tom Denys founded Dionysos Now! to bring Willaert’s neglected output back to musical life. Three volumes have already been issued digitally and on abridged LP but the fourth instalment is the first to also appear on CD.

Passio Domini nostri Jesu Christi secundum Joannem has no solo Evangelist or any other roles such as in later Passions; everything is set polyphonically for the entire ensemble. It was formerly attributed to Cipriano de Rore, although Denys’s short booklet note mentions vaguely that ‘musicologists are now quite certain that it should be attributed to Willaert’. It would have been illuminating to read a somewhat fuller commentary discussing precise sources, scholarship regarding authorship and the work’s musical content. Another obstacle is the sung text of the Passion printed solely in Latin without translation. Recorded in the attractively reverberant yet transparent acoustic of the refectory of the City Museum in Ghent, Dionysos Now!’s seven male voices (one countertenor, three tenors and three basses) perform with expert awareness of contrapuntal details, textures and words. A breadth of colours and sonorities are executed with marvellous dynamic flexibility while always inhabiting the music’s natural sphere.

The label Evil Penguin’s dastardly machinations extend to omitting the texts of six Willaert motets. High-quality music-making is engrossing in Tristis est anima mea (manuscript part-books in the Royal College of Music), Ecce lignum crucis (Willaert’s book of five-part motets, Venice, 1539) and Da pacem Domine (the mixed anthology Ecclesiasticarum cantionum, 1553). It is puzzling why three other motets – Infelix ego (1546), Flete oculi and Dulces exuviae (both from Willaert’s revised second book of four-voice motets, 1545) – are exclusive to digital platforms: the CD has plenty of spare running time. Hopefully future volumes will achieve better consistency of content across all formats, as well as diligent booklets sharing lucid insights – factors that will help to fulfil the project’s laudable goal to bring Willaert’s music to wider appreciation.