The present recording allows us to experience the astonishing breath of musical resources which Orlando di Lasso, the universal composer of the sixteenth century, had at his command: happy innocence, grotesquery mockery, the love song as well as the major works in the elevated melancholy style. This music is at its most effective when performed by a relatively small, virtuoso ensemble marked by transparency and vocal versatility and reflecting Lasso's musical circumstances in Munich; male voices only or male and boys' voices with clearly contoured song lines. A decisive performance factor is the reinforcement of the pérsuasive power of the music; such support results in vivid reproduction and interpretation of the text as wholes and in their details.