Founding Fretwork member Richard Boothby’s richly detailed program note traced the instrument’s origins to the Iberian peninsula, where a few Jewish players had evolved a bowed manner of playing the (usually plucked) vihuela. Upon the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the bearers of this nascent tradition were dispersed throughout the rest of Europe, mainly to Italy and the Netherlands initially, but soon farther afield.

By the 1540s, they found their way to the English court of Henry VIII, whose foreign musicians belonged predominantly to two Marrano (that is, crypto-Jewish) families, the Lupos and the Bassanos. Fretwork’s program centered on the music of these two dynasties, while drawing on works of other, mainly Jewish composers on the Continent, as well. It was an unexpected and welcome approach to the front end of the rich English consort repertory.

Is it being steeped in all that intricate counterpoint that causes viol consorts to design their programs so meticulously, or is it just that so many short pieces demand some sort of logical grouping in performance? Fretwork’s program was a model of the type, its materials arranged in short sets variously by composer, source, or style, and often laid out in some sort of pattern even within a set. Thus, a clutch of works by three generations of the Lupo family (Joseph, son Thomas, and grandson Theophilus) went from two parts to three, four, and five in succession. Another set, from the mid-16th century Lumley Partbooks, alternated two pavan-galliard pairs with three slower, graver pieces, each titled “desperada.” And the second half sandwiched music of Thomas Lupo and Salomone Rossi between the two parts of the evening's only contemporary composition, Orlando Gough’s Birds on Fire.

Fretwork’s hallmarks as a consort have always been precision, clarity, and attention to the long line. On Saturday the careful weighting of the lines in the fantasias was a constant pleasure, the counterpoint unfurling smoothly and seamlessly, all its detail audible. Every piece was shaped with undemonstrative but extraordinary skill. Theirs is a kind of playing in which the overall arc of a piece bears greater musical emphasis than moment-to-moment incident. It's an abstracted style, if you will, but one nonetheless capable of great emotional impact. Sometimes, the relative starkness of the playing was the key to the performance's vividness. In the second and third “desperadas,” for example, the somber simplicity of the playing made the false relations at the final cadences agonizingly keen.

There were some remarkable contrapuntal games to be enjoyed in the first half. Heinrich Isaac’s La mi la sol treats that four-note tag with every conceivable compositional device in its packed course. More subtly ingenious was the Fantasia con e senza pause, by Philip van Wilder. The piece is so designed that it can be played either as written, or with all the rests in all parts omitted, the resulting “no-holes” version being 10 bars shorter than the original. It's an aural version of those familiar puzzles in which a set of odd-shaped wooden tiles can be assembled neatly into two quite different shapes. Neither version (Fretwork played them back-to-back) shows any sign of contrapuntal labor. The music is serene and not in the least stilted.

Other high points of the first half were a fine, extended fantasia by Hieronymous Bassano, with fast-moving, dueling treble parts on top; a winningly simple four-part air by Thomas Lupo; and two symphonies by Leonora Duarte, a Jew of Portuguese extraction living in Antwerp. Whether she was actually, as Boothby speculates in his note, the only female Jewish composer before the 20th century I doubt very much.

But the music was arresting, even if the bulk of the credit in the second symphony belongs to Girolamo Frescobaldi. Duarte’s contribution here was only to add a fifth part to a pre-existing four-part piece, but a honey of a piece it was: another contrapuntal extravaganza built on a short “tag.” This time it was “sol mi fa la sol,” popping up persistently in the middle voice on various starting pitches, and given an appealing edge in Fretwork’s voice-weighting.

The same might be said of the ground bass line in Salomone Rossi’s variations on the Ruggiero (a favorite for instrumental improvisation), heard after intermission. The familiar line was crisp and jaunty in Boothby’s hands — toward the end of the piece the line mutated into a droll walking-bass variation of itself — while over it the two trebles led each other in a merry, intricate, endlessly varied chase. It was wholly delightful stuff, and quite brilliantly played, as were the more richly scored fantasias of Rossi and Thomas Lupo surrounding it.

The second half was dominated, though, by the Gough, a Fretwork commission from 2001. Gough took as his subject Aaron Appelfeld’s novel Badenheim 1939, in which the residents of an Austrian resort town are quietly but steadily divided into Jews and Gentiles, and the Jews in the end shipped east. The town’s resident Jewish musicians, their pride in their identity heightened by adversity, begin to mingle klezmer strains with the Viennese schlock they are compelled to play.

Gough’s music doesn’t set this out literally, though klezmerish melodic inflections come to dominate both halves of the piece. Each part begins with a series of slow, eerie unison pitches that give way to more rapid and increasingly rhythmically organized music. In the first part, it’s a fast quintuple-meter groove; in the second, a more complex, urgently driven music, heavily punctuated with pizzicatos — an odd sound from a viol consort and, I should think, a tricky one to produce.

Something in the nasal viol timbre both suggests the sound of Eastern European folk fiddling and lends an extra edge to the agitated material. Birds on Fire is a fascinating and highly effective piece. (The other Fretwork commissions I have heard have been of similarly high quality, incidentally. There seems to be something about exploring this new/old timbral world that brings out the best in a certain type of composer.)

There was one encore, announced as “something by that noted Jewish composer, Chaim Dowland” (oh, very droll). It proved to be a nimble account of the “Earl of Essex’s Galliard” from John Dowland’s 1604 publication, Lachrimae.