World-premiere recordings of motets by a host of unknown names from the early Italian Baroque: the latest result of performing scholarship by a group with a notable track record of success in this repertoire.

International critics have praised the ‘expert performances’ (Gramophone) of Cappella Artemisia, and the intrepid adventurousness of the ensemble’s founder, Candace Smith, in turning up one buried treasure after another, most of them to be found in the music libraries of Italian convents. The latest fruits of her research have turned up lamentations by Carlo Donato Cossoni, Alessandro Della Ciaia, Giovanni Matteo Asola, Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, Agostino Guerrieri, Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana, Giovanni Battista Strata, Maria Francesca Nascimbeni – and the best known name among them, Anonymous.

All the pieces here and probably all the composers will be unfamiliar even to those well versed in Baroque-era highways and byways, such as Brilliant Classics has catalogued so comprehensively over the last quarter-century. As Candace Smith observes in her insightful booklet essay, the practice of lamenting – voicing grief – has been associated with women since time immemorial. This album presents a sequence of laments and lamentations from 16th- and 17th-century Italy as they might have been sung in that most exclusively female environment: the convent.

Several of these laments belong to the long tradition of Passiontide compositions to which composers from Gesualdo to Macmillan have contributed, in setting texts from the Book of Lamentations which belong to the liturgy of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Still other pieces are sacred madrigals setting more contemporary texts, such as O trafitto mio Dio: the work of the 16-year-old Maria Francesca Nascimbeni, before she took the veil.

Musical life was often remarkably rich behind the convent walls. One traveller to Genoa 1592 encountered a young nun who could play the organ, the violin and the lira da gamba, as well as singing beautifully and resembling ‘more an angel than a woman’. Thus this album presents a tiny sample of that culture: one which should entrance listeners on account both of the beauty of the unknown music, as well as the hidden stories behind its composition.