Just a few months after “Firenze 1616” (Alpha, 7/08) comes a disc subtitled “Firenze 1600”. The only item in common is “Muove si dolce” from Caccini’s Il rapimento di Cefalo. The present recording omits the choral refrain, but Joel Frederiksen’s performance is marginally more secure. Not all the pieces date from 1600, nor do they all come from Florence. The title is the last line of Pietà, di chi si more by Johann Kapsberger, a German who spent most of his working life in Rome. The first of a handful of sacred arias in a mainly secular collection, it features all three of Frederiksen’s continuo colleagues, with the gamba-player including some pleasing melodic decoration. A third of the pieces are by Caccini, Dalla porta d’oriente bearing a startling rhythmic resemblance to “Vi ricorda, o bosch’ombrosi” from Monteverdi’s Orfeo. Monteverdi himself gets a look-in with Io che nell’otio nacqui.

Frederiksen is a singer who accompanies himself on the lute. His description as a coloratura basso profondo is an apt one. He has a rich bottom register, descending to an interpolated low A in Landi’s Superbi colli, and he executes melismas with precision. But when he sings above the stave his tone thins out and he sounds distinctly uncomfortable: the top G in Caccini’s Io, che l’età solea is a real horror. Amor ch’attendi, a jolly, strophic number, goes with a swing; but it’s not enough to save a recital of indifferent quality.