Dunstable anthologies are rare birds but they tend to be of superlative quality: the ones from the Hilliard Ensemble and the Orlando Consort both won Gramophone Awards. It would be good to report as favourably on Naxos’s first foray into this early English repertoire but while Tonus Peregrinus pose interesting questions, their answers do not quite convince.

Writing a long while after Dunstable, Frescobaldi once remarked of his music that the most important factor in a successful performance was the correct interpretation of tempi. This observation holds as true for Dunstable’s period as it does for Frescobaldi’s, but in both cases, scholars and performers often disagree as to what speeds are appropriate. Suffice it to say, then, that Anthony Pitts’s choice of tempi (specifically, the relative beat between triple and duple mensurations) results in very slow speeds in duple sections. These pose problems for the performers, especially the very high women’s voices to which some of the pieces are given.

Pitts is commendably courageous in emending the edition as he feels appropriate but in many cases his changes jar with Dunstable’s idiom. The most striking example is his proposed ‘reconstruction’ of the four-voice canon: one of his added parts contains a note that grates repeatedly on the ear.

Finally, I cannot help but feel that the singers’ voices are not uniformly suited to this music. The principal bass’s vibrato and powerful timbre is quite overbearing and contrasts too sharply with the whiteness of the female voices. Add to this a few wrong notes and the result falls well short of the ensemble’s ambitions.