‘Chromaticism is a rare and exotic bloom in Western music,” writes Exaudi’s director James Weeks in his wonderfully comprehensive essay in his group’s disc of late 16th-century choral works. “It flowers only when conditions allow: when a harmonic theory exists which can accommodate it, and more importantly when composers desire to use it to increase the emotional expressiveness of their music.”

Exaudi’s exploration of the power of chromaticism begins with the high renaissance settings of Orlando di Lasso – his motet Timor et Tremor and six of the cycle of 12 motets that make up his Prophetiae Sibyllarum. It then moves through settings of more unfamiliar composers such as Vicente Lusitano and Nicola Vicentino to end with Marenzio and Luzzaschi, whose madrigals – settings of Petrarch and a section of Dante’s Inferno respectively – seem to be poised on the cusp between the renaissance and the early baroque.

It’s music that was composed in the same period as Gesualdo’s much better known madrigals, which sometimes use chromaticism and dissonance to even more spectacular effect. Yet the writhing, convoluted lines of these pieces, negotiated with exemplary precision and clarity by the seven singers of Exaudi, their voices perfectly matched and balanced, carry their own expressive power. This is a disc that becomes more fascinating and involving the more you listen to it.