When Queen Elizabeth I visited the Hampshire home of the Duke of Hertford at Elvetham in 1591, she was royally entertained by a mixed consort of six instruments. The same grouping, in the shape of William Lyons’s versatile City Musick, attempted to recreate the occasion.

It hardly mattered that the group used Morley’s Consort Lessons, written some eight years after the visit, alongside music belonging to Elizabeth’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham. What really tickled the fancy was this particular ensemble - recorder and treble viol at the top, lute, bandora and cittern, all plucked or strummed, in the middle, with bass viol underlay.

The true engine-room of City Musick’s sextet is the lutenist Elizabeth Kenny, whose fingerwork enlivens everything she touches. The inner voices - Kenny along with Emilia Benjamin’s treble viol - were particularly impressive in Walsingham’s Goodnight, by Daniel Bacheler. The same composer’s Walsingham’s Conceits, a set of variations, brought equal finesse from Lyons’s recorder.

Despite his lack of eye contact with his audience, Jason Darnell’s agile tenor was absorbing in four songs by the little-known Breton composer Guillaume Tessier, who dedicated a volume to Elizabeth. Dowland’s Can She Excuse My Wrongs had an extra verve, heard alongside his galliard of the same name. Best of all was the way his ornamentation in Tessier’s Mi Fai Morire (You kill me) captured the lover’s quiver of excitement. Kenny was his inspired accompanist.