Never mind the plainchant...

MUSIC Ensemble Clement Janequin Wigmore Hall, London;

Record company executives these days appear remarkably eager to satisfy the atavistic urges of countless New Age travellers, plugging the tranquil delights of monastic chant and the ethereal qualities of early sacred polyphony with a vigour fortified more often by visions of pound signs than concerns for spiritual welfare. While contemplation and prayer are central components of so much medieval music, earthly pleasures were also celebrated with a directness and passion in compositions all too easily overlooked by newcomers to the period. The Ensemble Clement Janequin is in business to open ears and minds to the stylistic diversity of early secular music, drawn chiefly from the rich repertoire of 16th- century French chansons and supplemented by a fair measure of their Spanish and Italian equivalents. The all-male group's pungent vocal style and healthy enjoyment of singing demotic texts provide the perfect antidote to an overdose of wistful plainchant and hypnotic devotional songs.

The Paris-based Ensemble entertained its Wigmore Hall audience with tales of turd-eating pigs, suicidal lovers, shipwrecks and great battles, popular themes that appealed to middle-class connoisseurs in the 1530s and 1540s. Works by little-known characters, such as Joan Brudieu and Juan Vasquez, were presented here in company with gems by Josquin, Claudin de Sermisy and Janequin, unimaginatively subdivided into a first half of worthy Spanish music and a post-interval burst of inspired Franco-Flemish compositions.

Although Habsburg-Valois rivalry may stand as a reason for geographical separation, the subtle musical conflicts and connections between composers working north and south of the Pyrenees would have been more clearly exposed by pairing Vasquez's impassioned "El que sin ti bivir" with Josquin's exquisite "Mille regretz", or the two battle-pieces by Flecha and Janequin. Even so, the delivery of the latter works was done with such conviction and panache as to make stylistic comparisons seem largely irrelevant. Janequin's onomatopoeia and sense of dramatic pacing may prove victorious over Flecha's La Guerra, but the excitement and freshness of both works were what counted here. The impact was strengthened by the spare-no-prisoners, diamond-edged tone of Dominique Visse, counter-tenor and assured director of proceedings, closer in sound to Jimmy Somerville than James Bowman.

Period pronunciation, together with the use of various permutations of lutes, guitars, bass viol and organ, contributed to the Ensemble's attractively piquant sound, although not always to the clarity of texture: Josquin's "Douleur me bat" and renowned tribute to fellow composer Ockeghem, "Nymphes des bois", were unwisely presented as monochrome, rather turgid affairs, outshone by the colourful brilliance of his "El grillo" and "Scaramella". The programme's instrumental interludes, reliably if not brilliantly played, ranged from mundane dances to Diego Ortiz's profound recercada on the song "O felichi occhi miei" and Gregoire Brayssing's sprightly Fantasie V, neatly done by guitarist Eric Belloq. It was the wildest, least inhibited music that received the most persuasive interpretations from the Ensemble Clement Janequin, secure in pitch and ensemble, full of character and alive to the bizarre humour and theatricality of songs that mimic everything from barking dogs and duff singers to crowing Frenchmen and cowardly Spaniards.