This coming May sees the 400th anniversary of the birth of one of Britain’s most striking composers – although as recently as half a century ago, few would have recognised William Lawes as such. Only since then have scholars and performers gradually disinterred from the archives a full range of the consort and vocal music, which was composed, in all its richness and strangeness, over a mere couple of decades by this loyal servant (unto death) of Charles I.

Just how rich and strange was immediately manifest in an exceptionally cogent concert devised by Mark Levy, leader of that accomplished viol consort Concordia, for the opening evening of their Lawes anniversary series at the Wigmore Hall.

Dispensing with the kind of verse-readings from the period, lecturettes on "historical background" and whatnot that are all too usual in such programmes, this one made its points musically. The matching of consort music and vocal settings by Lawes with equivalent pieces by his great predecessor, William Byrd, and successor, Henry Purcell, positively dramatised the contrast between their settled mastery and his passionate, almost experimental daring.

Three of Lawes’s Setts, or suites, for six viols with chamber organ continuo provided the programme’s spine: music alternately of volatile feeling and fathomless sonority. Compared with the down-to-earth logic of Byrd’s Fantasy a 6 in G minor, or the elegant partwriting of Purcell’s Fantasy on one note, Concordia’s account of the opening Fantazy from Lawes’s Sett a 6 in F major luxuriated in his propensity to dissolve counterpoint into sheer texture, emphasising the chiming interference patterns between parts – in this instance, majestic chains of descending thirds – just as their reading of the second Fantazy in the same Sett made the most if its almost bar-by-bar shifts of mood and unaccountable final switch from ebullience to tragedy.

For the vocal items, various members of Concordia were joined by the seraphic countertenor Robin Blaze. Here, in comparison with, especially, Purcell’s infallible ear fro English word-setting, Lawes’s efforts occasionally sounded a mite awkward – in his canticle "When Man for Sin Thy Judgement Feels", for instance.

And though Blaze found a searing conviction in its refrain, his serene radiance in Purcell’s "An Evening Hymn" was quite something else. All the same, the next Lawes concert in 24 January, in which Concordia are joined by Emma Kirkby, is absolutely not to be missed.

BAYAN NORTHCOTT