A musical journey through Renaissance Europe via pieces that were highly popular and whose melodies were reused and varied by some of the best composers of the time.

This program focuses on the Missa pro defunctis by the composer Charles d'Argentil. Recorded for the first time here, it is one of only a dozen musical settings of the liturgy of the dead written before 1550 to have survived to this day. Little-known today, Charles d'Argentil, who worked in the prestigious Papal Chapel in Rome, was a key figure in the French Renaissance, as well as in the establishment of musical settings of the Requiem for papal ceremonies. His setting sits alongside the three Lamentations du samedi saint by Claudin de Sermisy, composer to the French royal chapel and Jehan Barra's Salve Regina. The Gilles Binchois ensemble here sheds light on an all-too-often overlooked part of musical history, through the generation that directly followed Josquin des Prez. The art of these three composers bears witness to the high level of mastery attained by that productive and talented generation.

The members of Cinquecento turn to perhaps the pre-eminent composer of the sixteenth century: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah would have been integral to the liturgical rites of Holy Week: here is one of the most sublime.

In the middle of the 16th century, the Geneva Psalter infected the whole of Reformed Europe – Switzerland included – with a true psalm fever. The first complete collection of all 150 psalms, promoted by the Genevan reformer Jean Calvin, was published in 1562. The psalm verses were translated into French and provided with melodies by various Genevan cantors.

Profeti della Quinta (Prophets of the Perfect Fifth) is a male vocal ensemble, specializing in the music of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Founded in the Galilee region of Israel by Elam Rotem, the ensemble is currently based in Basel, Switzerland, where its members undertook advanced studies at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. The core of the ensemble includes countertenor, tenor and bass singers, who perform either a-cappella or together with period instruments such as theorbo and harpsichord.

Like many of even the most prolific and celebrated composers of the sixteenth century, Jacobus Clemens non Papa (‘not the Pope’) has offered the history books little factual material with which to work. In contrast to the paucity of biographical material, however, many sources of Clemens' music survive. Indeed, he is one of the most widely published musicians of the entire century with fifteen Masses, over two hundred motets, many Dutch psalms and French chansons to his name.

Sergio Vartolo gave us a broader understanding of Palestrina's output of Masses by recording for another label a group of less familiar Mass settings, many for the first time, that offer a contrast with the more familiar solemn polyphonic style.

A collection of works representative of a school of Flemish composers living in Madrid towards the end of the Renaissance and all employed by Philip II of Spain, who held composers from the Low Countries in particularly high regard. La Hèle’s Mass, here receiving its first complete recording, is a major discovery.

The late-Renaissance keyboard music of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck is virtuosic to a high degree, reflecting both his exceptional skills as an improviser and the secular role organ music was assigned in Reformed Amsterdam. Without a liturgical function to constrain his imagination or shape his music – Calvinist services had no place for it – Sweelinck was free to provide fanciful showpieces for his daily recitals in the Oude Kerk. Examples of his improvisational style can be found in the quasi-fugal Hexachord Fantasia, the witty Echo Fantasia, and the flamboyant Toccatas, of which three are included here. Yet Sweelinck's music is also rigorously logical and full of ingenious contrapuntal devices. These are readily found in his fantasias, but are prominently featured in his numerous sets of variations. His elaborate settings of the chorales Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr and Erbarm dich mein, o Herre Gott, and his variations on popular melodies, such as the famous Mein junges Leben hat ein End, display his invention and thorough manipulation of his subjects in all registers. Perhaps better known as a harpsichordist, Robert Woolley is also a fine organist. Woolley has selected representative works from each of Sweelinck's favored genres and given them exceptional performances on the Van Hagerbeer organ of the Pieterskerk, Leiden.

In the margin of official religious institutions, Catholic confraternities and Muslim orders offered a mystical experience. Music played an important role in their rituals, as a way of access to God. Simple, repetitive, haunting, this music sung in groups during processions or devotional meetings was intended to place the assembly in a state of ecstatic trance.

Born in Italy in the 16th century, Palestrina ranks with Lassus and Byrd as one of the most important figures in the music of this time. In his Missa L'homme arme, Palestrina makes use of a fifteenth-century secular song of the same name as a cantus firmus for polyphonic elaboration. This performance of the mass, with its interpolation of organ ricercari by Girolamo Cavazzoni, seeks to restore earlier performance traditions.

The Cancionero de Medinaceli or Cancionero Musical de Medinaceli (CMM) is a manuscript containing Spanish music of the Renaissance. It was copied during the second half of the 16th century and kept at the library of the Duke of Medinaceli's house, hence its name. Is it probably the most important compilation of Spanish secular polyphony of the Renaissance after the Cancionero de Palacio.

The Baltimore Consort used to do programs similar to this one, but The Harp Consort takes the production values and vocal artistry to an even higher level. From the opening, a highly rhythmic, sensuously melodic traditional Breton number, you're drawn into a world of earthy, folk-based music that's filled out with the colors of period instruments and brought to life by the expressive voices of singers who allow the flow and pulse of the language to shape phrases and create natural accents and inflection. The result is affecting, engrossing performances that convey what we can only surmise is a reasonably accurate realization of these ancient and justifiably enduring tunes.

The music of Shakespeare's England - ballad tunes, country dances and elegant consorts - seems at first to be quintessentially English. Yet many of these tunes, as popular dances or in the high-art variations of division music, were inspired by Celtic and Spanish styles. In variations, from 17th-century manuscripts and in improvised divisions, 'gypsy' ballads are metamorphosed into exquisite consort music.

The works of the 15th-century composer Guillaume Dufay are often considered to be where medieval music ends and Renaissance music begins. Yet Dufay sounds quite different from later, better-known Renaissance composers such as Palestrina, Victoria, and Josquin: Dufay's music is less densely scored, with more stratified voice ranges, very complex rhythms, and a somewhat neutral emotional affect. Pomerium, a New York-based choir with extensive experience in Dufay, presents here one of the composer's largest works: a setting of both the ordinary (Kyrie, Gloria, etc.) and the propers (texts specific to the occasion) of the Mass for the feast of St. Anthony of Padua. Pomerium's polished performance makes this a fine addition to the Dufay discography.