Following their Gramophone Recording of the Year Award for 2010, Andrew Carwood and Hyperion have risked all to record a curiosity that was published in 1930 but has been quietly gathering dust ever since. It is a cyclic Mass in 12 voices, probably from the 1580s, based on Palestrina’s famous motet Cantantibus organis and composed by seven composers. Palestrina himself wrote part of the Gloria but the rest is by men who are so little known that they hardly even make it into Grove. That looks like commercial suicide. What this disc shows, though, is that they all deserve much better fate than being buried in a list of Palestrina’s younger colleagues. It also shows that a burning commitment can lift music off the page and give it real life. The movements by Annibale Stabile and Ruggiero Giovanelli were perhaps the ones that struck my own ear most forcibly; but this is all really exciting stuff and should be heard by anybody who cares about music of the late-16th century.

But the rather later composer Allegri gets the main billing here, presumably because that’s the only way to sell the CD. His Miserere – famous largely because of embellishments written down a century after he died – gets a lovely performance, if the three other motets added here slightly overstay their welcome. But the opening work is a treasure: Felice Anerio’s eight-voice Salve regina.