While Oswald von Wolkenstein counts as one of the most delightful and resourceful poets in the German language, his musical position remains harder to define. Two manuscripts of his poetry have large quantities of music, but almost half of the polyphony there is now known to be by other composers. Not only that, but when you know the original songs it is often hard to think that what Oswald did was a musical improvement: his new texts are always glorious, but to make them fit the music he subdivided notes, added text to passages originally textless, and generally coarsened some of the most perfect French and Italian songs of the years around 1400.

Rainer Böhm plainly understands this problem; and in fact he adds the identification of a hitherto unknown polyphonic model from Binchois. And he takes an intelligent approach to solving the problem. Several of the pieces are simply played by an ensemble of shawms: this means you lose Oswald’s texts, but you do get marvellous music, played with precision and elegance. For others he uses voices with a basse musique ensemble of fiddles, recorders and lute, often following the German sources in putting text only to the tenor voice and putting the rest of the polyphony above it on recorders (with bold but intriguing results); for these, though, they generally use the original French or Italian texts. Then for just three pieces you get the monophonic singing of Markus Schuck, with drone-based accompaniments.

These last are really the only ones where you get more or less unadulterated Oswald. But most of the remaining music was used by Oswald, and the choice of materials gives a good perspective of what was known in Southern Germany in the first years of the 15th century. All the performances are highly skilled, with a good variety of colours and approaches; but perhaps the main thing is that the performances remain vital and vivid throughout. This is good listening.