Much as DJs go crate-diving for obscurities, early-music specialists love a rummage in the archive. Nele Vertommen was searching for 17th-century oboe pieces when she came across these rarities from a collection put together by Georg Österreich, about whom little is known except some occasional music and the biggest Central European collection of pre-Bach sacred music we know of. Musically, the material here is scarcely deathless, but it’s played and sung with professional conviction, as it would have been in its day, and in sum it conjures up a time in music which doesn’t always answer to the easy generalis-ations we level at it. Full marks for committedness, but the real interest is historical, since these are all world premiere recordings, ‘as far as we know’.

★★★