As ensemble-in-residence at the university since September, I Fagiolini is duty-bound to give a performance or two on campus every year.

But there was nothing routine about Wednesday’s programme of what might loosely be termed madrigals - canciones, chansons, lieder, depending on their origin - drawn from 16th century continental repertory.

Nothing Robert Hollingworth does is understated, and his six singers (among whom he is the countertenor) added plenty of movement to their music. Nothing wrong with that: madrigals were written with select performance, not a paying audience, in mind and a little theatre helps projection.

Not all the antics here seemed to have much to do with the texts: cosying up to another singer or subjecting an unfortunate from the audience to innocent ribaldry. No matter, they drew a full house of early music buffs from well beyond the campus enclave.

Janequin’s playful birds ganging up on the cuckoo were only mildly risqué compared to the hectic high jinks of Matheo Flecha’s ensalada (Christmas entertainment), El Fuego (Fire), a tour de force delivered from memory.

Vivid word-painting in the Italian style dominated the second half: Striggio’s appealing tribute to Elizabeth I as a nimble leopard, for example. Wilder aspects of the new technique were well evoked by De Wert’s picture of Jesus calming the waves.

Four Monteverdi madrigals proved the pinnacle. They included a beautifully controlled love-song, but oddly some seemed more Anglo-Saxon than Mediterranean in their restraint, contemporaneous as they were with the birth of opera.