This performance imagines them being sung in a 16th-century nunnery, so Brumel’s original low-voice scoring is transposed for female singers, with an organ and a viol providing lower parts. The resulting sound is radiant but it lacks the tenebrous quality that better reflects the plangent Passion Week text…The all-female vocal ensemble produces a delicate, unforced, vibrato-less sound.

The singing is charming and the final selection, a seven-minute anonymous Salve Regina in an alternatim setting, is ravishing. This well-filled program is of unusual interest.

Stras’s discovery almost doubles the length of the work and delightfully complicates its function...Musica Secreta begin rather carefully...The work, and indeed the performance, really begins to reveal its true richness at the first refrain, ‘Ierusalem convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum’...As so often with Musica Secreta, the meeting of inspired musicology with passionate and committed performance generates something way beyond the sum of its parts.