With Elisabeth Paul (mezzo)

An exploration of the first great body of European music to rework existing songs, from the years around 1500. At the courts of northern Italy and in the first published songbooks, settings of courtly love poetry were treated to highly inventive reworkings, sometimes with elegant textless parts suitable for the newly developed consort of viols. These songs travelled from France and Italy as far as the courts of Henry VIII and Maximilian I in Vienna. The Rose Consort plays a unique set of viols derived from a Bolognese painting of 1497 by Lorenzo da Costa, later to become court painter to Isabella d’Este.