Subtitled “The Glorious Age of Medieval and Renaissance Canons” this disc offers a short but interesting survey of the use of a favourite compositional device throughout its heyday. For those unfamiliar with the term, a canon is essentially a melody that is repeated at a distance by one or more voices. While the childhood ditty Frère Jacques may provide a basic model, composers from the 14th to 17th centuries turned this procedure into a highly sophisticated process by manipulating various parameters such as the distance, pitch and speed at which the various voices entered. Canons were also piled on top of each other to create further polyphonic complexity.

Across the disc’s 47 minutes we hear canonic works by some medieval and renaissance giants: Dufay, Ockeghem, Mouton, Josquin, Willaert and Palestrina. Running the gamut from simple examples from the famous Tournai manuscript of the mid 1300s through to the striking and almost frenetic originality of Josquin’s Se congié prens de mes belles amours, the program offers a useful, if all too brief conspectus of polyphonic ingenuity. The Missa pro Vigiliis ac Feriis in...