The Gesualdo Six / Owain Park FADING

 

FADING

 

The Gesualdo Six / Owain Park FADING

                                                                          FADING

Stile Antico A SPANISH NATIVITY

The Spanish ‘Golden Age’ witnessed an astonishing musical flowering, worthy of Spain’s newfound preeminence on the world stage. Focusing on works for Christmas and Epiphany, Stile Antico explores this glittering musical treasury, drawing together an irresistible mix of sumptuous polyphony and infectiously joyful folk dances.

The centrepiece of the disc is the superbly rich and luminous Missa Beata Dei genitrix Maria by Alonso Lobo. Interspersed between its movements are motets by Tomás Luis de Victoria, Francisco Guerrero and Cristóbal de Morales, an exuberant ‘ensalada’ by Mateo Flecha and classic villancicos - Spain’s answer to the traditional carol.

Coro Victoria / Ana Fernández-Vega ALONSO LOBO Sacred Vocal Music

On this new recording, Coro Victoria offers a portrait of Alonso Lobo (1555-1617) through a cross-section of his sacred output (his works in Spanish are all lost). The group also illustrates the variety of interpretative practices of the period. The concluding O quam suavis est Domine is sung by a single soprano while the vihuela accompaniment supplies the remaining five parts. Church choirs sang this music in the liturgy, but minstrels also played it during processions, and there was free traffic between sacred and secular contexts. 

Coro Victoria was founded by its director, Ana Fernández-Vega, to recover and preserve a native, historically informed tradition of singing Spanish polyphony from its Renaissance-era high noon, exemplified not only by Victoria himself but also his contemporaries such as the Seville-born and bred Alonso Lobo (indeed, Victoria considered Lobo his equal). He is now best known for a haunting, six-voice setting of the Requiem, and his magnificent motet for the obsequies of King Philip II, Versa est in luctum shares the Requiem’s tone of mourning and remembrance, established by a dense mesh of overlapping counterpoint. 

Coro Victoria also presents other sides to a composer whose style is far more various than is commonly assumed. As well as the beautifully handled techniques of canon and counterpoint in Marian motets such as Ave Maria and Ave Regina coelorum, distinguishing features of Lobo’s style are his jagged melodic lines, a far cry from Palestrina’s smooth curves, and his more animated conclusions, both vividly demonstrated by Vivo ego, dicit Dominus. 

There is also a complete, portmanteau setting of the Mass, drawn from his Missa O Rex gloriae, Missa Petre ego pro te rogavi and Missa Simile est regnum caelorum, with the Credo filled in by the separate Credo Romano, which is underpinned by a figured bass and continued to be popular long after his death. These polished performances should renew wider interest in Lobo’s music.

Ensemble Plus Ultra FROM SPAIN TO ETERNITY The Sacred Polyphony of El Greco's Toledo

Several of the composers on this Archiv release - Alonso Lobo, Cristóbal de Morales, perhaps Francisco Guerrero - will be familiar to anyone who has sung in a college glee club. Their short motets, with orderly polyphony that seems to hang in a perfect balance, seem to communicate timeless religious essences. Less common are recordings that situate the music in the Spanish cities where it was composed, and that's not what is here. Although the graphics promise "sacred polyphony of El Greco's Toledo," only the career of the comparatively lesser-known Alonso de Tejeda really overlapped with that of Greek-Spanish master; the rest of the composers worked there earlier or, in the case of Francisco Guerrero, hardly at all (he served there as Morales' apprentice). And even if assigning correspondences between the music and art of a given place and time is a tricky business, the art of El Greco, with its Mannerist distortions of reality, seems almost diametrically opposed to the peaceful world of these composers; his musical cousin is perhaps Italian Carlo Gesualdo. So listeners are left with the cleanly sung readings of the Ensemble Plus Ultra, a bit small at eight singers but precise in that difficult configuration. The sounds coming out of your speakers will be appealing, but the group has plenty of competition on this ground. (James Manheim)