Isabella d’Este was one of the most famous patrons of the arts in the Renaissance, and music seems to have been especially dear to her. Apart from much direct evidence – she was a keen performer – modern scholarship has linked extant manuscripts to the Mantuan court, and most of the music heard on this disc is drawn from one of these. There is the typical mix of ‘high-art’ Franco-Flemish and Italian music of more popular inspiration; most of the instrumental pieces belong to the first category, most of the vocal selections to the second.

Musica Antiqua of London arrange the programme in their accustomed manner, short sets of related pieces (these groupings are often illuminating: the anonymous El piove à 3 that precedes the four-voice version of Agricola’s Si dedero sounds uncannily Agricolesque, and I suspect that it would be easy enough to make a case for his authorship). But taken in the round this recital doesn’t quite have the focus of some other recent recordings from this ensemble. The ‘high art’ and popular selections are clearly different repertories, but the playing (mostly on viols, and generally smooth) doesn’t make a very clear distinction between them.

The mezzo Clare Wilkinson sounds slightly miscast: hers is in the main a lyrical voice, and the Italian texts (mostly rather truculent) don’t really ‘bite’ as they should – partly a matter of vocal delivery, and a certain lack of consistency of vibrato. But when the instruments and the voice go all out to match the music’s rusticity (as in O triumphale diamante, played on crumhorns, with Wilkinson in the lower part of her range), the result is pleasantly rough-hewn, and very convincing.