Piffaro performs Renaissance airs with a fine flourish

In the Renaissance, the musical landscape must have grown like a field of wildflowers - a burst of color in Amsterdam, another in Antwerp, more up the Rhine, and a tumult of flowering in Italy.

Drawn in this program to the Flemish masters of the colorful Lowland countries, the seven musicians of Piffaro showed where the blossoming was greatest as they played their season-opening concerts during the weekend in Philadelphia and Wilmington.

Change came like the wind. One composer could attract students who quickly moved beyond their master. Their new model in turn became yesterday's news as exploration in counterpoint and sonority demanded ever more virtuosic players - whose gifts inspired greater flights of composition.

In its 23 seasons, Piffaro has followed paths, both traveled and neglected, into European musical beginnings. In the concert Sunday in Wilmington, the players fused musical agility with expansive freedom. It was like hearing a top-flight jazz group handing melodies around for variation and laughingly competing for prominence.

Much of the program was dance music, rollicking, bouncy dance music. The sacred music by Josquin and Isaac, Jacob Clemens and Andreas Pevernage wasn't very solemn either, but moved its listeners with intricate meters and some extraordinary pairing of instruments that merged beauty and spirituality. In Piffaro's arrangement of Obrecht's Tant que notre argent dura, the bagpipe-shawm duet was sweet singing in any setting.

The ensemble has a record of theatricality, and this concert program was no different. Robert Wiemken described how Josquin and Heinrich Isaac competed for the Duke of Ferrara's court position, then the group played parts of the two audition pieces and the audience voted for the winner. Wilmington preferred Isaac; Ferrara liked Josquin. Wilmington had evolved, while the Duke clung to an already receding standard.

By playing widely diverse wind instruments, the ensemble established an unspoken teaching platform. Here were two sackbuts (trombone ancestors) in fugal duet, there a tune shaped by recorders, lute, harp, sackbuts and big-shouldered oboes (shawms). The program drew its listeners on to subtle compositional advances, summaries and high-spirited vernacular dance.

The set of dances by Tylman Susato ran through a catalog of instrumental sounds while illustrating Breughel's canvas-filling audacities. Along the way, there were moments. The recorder song in "Mille Regretz" caught the best intentions of this concert, but the boisterous "La Morisque" at the end showed that serious composers had their nights on the town.