There is no mistaking it as the product of Hespèrion XXI: the soundworld, with a wide range of instruments and featuring percussion, the distinctive voice of Figueras and the distinguished viol-playing of Savall. And as the stimulating booklet-notes by Rui Vieira Nery suggest, what we glimpse here is the persistence of various cultures within a multicultural, multilingual context and ‘the permanent interplay between all social levels of artistic movements’. So the popular, of whatever cultural tradition – European, African, Amerindian – rubs shoulders with the more cultivated.

The mix of musical elements in these (mostly 17th-century) pieces from Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula is fascinating. Dance rhythms pervade much of this vocal music, the texts of which are rich in imagery or dynamic in their dialogue format. I particularly enjoyed the semi-improvised cachua which, though featuring viol and plucked strings, could well be imagined on panpipes, and Torrejón y Velasco’s beautiful Christmas villancico in the form of a lullaby, Desvelado dueño mio, performed with finely judged expressivity: touching but unsentimentalised.

Cererols’s eight-part villancico based on the popular melody of the otherwise quite racy Marizápolos melody is similarly affecting. No percussion in these two items, but plenty elsewhere. Some of the texts, particularly that of the five-voice negro Antonya, Flaciquia, Gasipà by the Portuguese Filipe da Madre de Deus, are not only racy but racist by today’s standards. It is all so interesting – a really original contribution from Hespèrion XXI.