‘Le Tre Soprano: The Three Ladies of Ferrara’ is much more than a musical portrait of a famous performing group, the late 16th-century concerto delle donne (or consort of ladies) formed at the court of Duke Alfonso II of Ferrara. It is a lively, touching, virtuoso sketch of an entire age of privilege, cultivation and social precarity. The three ladies, drawn from minor nobility and prosperous families on the fringes of courtly society, were famous and influential in their own day. Scholarship in the 20th century now understands their trailblazing work for female musicians as an essential historical fulcrum, with wide influence throughout Europe at the time and especially on the music of Monteverdi, Gesualdo, Barbara Strozzi and others.

Much of the pleasure of this album, and in music of this period, is in the instrumental realisations of often quite bare-boned scores. Apollo’s Fire, under Jeannette Sorrell, are fearless and inventive in their recreation of this music, from boisterous ensembles that could hold their own against a contemporary jazz club to meditative, spare, melancholy renderings that maximise the expressive power of one or two instruments or voices.

The heart of the album comes with a set of three works grouped under the heading ‘Disdain’: vocal pieces by Strozzi, Monteverdi and Virgilio Mazzocchi with texts that deal with the sharp pain of love lost, squandered or unrequited. Mazzochi’s Sdegno, campion audace captures the sophisticated irony of a reflexively poetic age with a text that addresses disdain as a champion in the martial arts of love: ‘Long live Disdain! When it raises its face, Disdain wants no more truce.’

These three vocal works allow each of the three very fine singers solo opportunities. Amanda Powell’s plaintively expressive rendition of Strozzi’s Che si può fare contrasts sharply and pleasingly with the higher tessitura and bravura ornamentation of Amanda Forysthe’s Sdegno, campion audace. And Amanda Crider’s richly textured voice adds yet more colour and impressive passagework in Monteverdi’s ‘Quel sguardo sdegnosetto’ from the Scherzi musicali. The instrumental realisation of Strozzi’s four-note chaconne bass line is a particular delight.

The concerto delle donne was a relatively short-lived group who established precedents for female musicians and small vocal ensembles that specialised in the fleet ornamentation and challenging divisions of the period style. They gathered in the 1580s to add variety and professionalism to the chamber music of Alfonso’s court, but Alfonso died less than 20 years later and Ferrara was absorbed into the Papal States. Anna Guarini, the most renowned of the original three singers, was murdered by her husband in 1598, a not uncommon example of the violence that men could exercise on women with near impunity. The booklet notes recount this history along with the dizzying complexity of women’s status in Italian society at the time: ‘As we have seen today, progress in equality for women (or for people of colour) can lead to a backlash from those who feel threatened.’

Yet the programme is full of a keen lust for life, music, dance and love on the sharp edge of death and misfortune, from the opening vocal work (the Passacaglia della vita or ‘dance of life’, attributed to Stefano Landi) to the wild, bumptious dance of Juan Arañes’s Un sarao de la chacona, an early and exuberant foray into the licence and mad energy associated with the chaconne’s supposed New World origins. A fine solo reading (by Parker Ramsey on the Baroque triple harp) of a toccata by Luzzascho Luzzaschi captures a more meditative, scholarly side of the court’s engagement with music, adding to the range of expression and variety of techniques on display.