Hille Perl / Lee Santana / Steve Player LOS OTROS

 

LOS OTROS

Hirundo Maris SILENT NIGHT

The year ends its round. This is the time when the night is sovereign. In the dark, faces move away. Life goes to sleep. The hours move differently. Everything is different: the familiar trees, the streets of the village, the sounds of the house. Strange face of the world, frightening mystery of darkness. When winter comes, the great ancestral fear comes back too, the anguish rising from the origins. When will the day come back? When will the light be reborn? When will life return to its colors? And what if the world should descend into eternal night and cold? What if the old world should die? At the solstice people approach the stars; their hearts are frightened by their smallness and weakness. So, wisely, they contemplate the universe, and the place of their small world in a big world. It is the time of celebrations. To ward off fear, people gather. They hope for the promise of a new dawn. They seek illumination in the fires they light. Innumerable, the years that make up the history of humanity. Innumerable, the destinies that have crossed the bridge of time. The human tapestry unfolds through the seasons. Some stitches are marked with gold. Here is the story that has illuminated, forever and forever, the march of humans down the centuries. 

Hirundo Maris, the ensemble led by the Catalan Arianna Savall and the Norwegian Petter Udland Johansen, invites us on a mystical journey into the magic world of winter, Advent and Christmas music. This special programme of music, assembled by Hirundo Maris, contains songs with traditional roots and ancient origins, songs from the North and the South, filled with rejoicing, and songs of the present that embrace the songs of the past. Hirundo Maris is characterized by very personal and creative musical arrangements and a love of the past merging with the present. In this programme the ancient spirit harmonizes with the modern.

Hespèrion XXI / Jordi Savall MUSICA NOVA

 For more than fifty years, Jordi Savall has rescued musical gems from the obscurity of neglect and oblivion and given them back for all to enjoy. A tireless researcher into early music, he interprets and performs the repertory both as a gambist and a conductor. His activities as a concert performer, teacher, researcher and creator of new musical and cultural projects have made him a leading figure in the reappraisal of historical music and recipient of many awards and honors. Together with Montserrat Figueras, he founded the ensembles Hespèrion XXI (1974), La Capella Reial de Catalunya (1987) and Le Concert des Nations (1989), with whom he explores and creates a world of emotion and beauty shared with millions of early music enthusiasts around the world. He is European Union Ambassador for intercultural dialogue, and received a Grammy for Small Ensemble Performance, among many others.

On Musica Nova, Jordi Savall and Hespèrion XXI have collected the best pieces for viol consort composed between 1500 and 1700. London, Venice, Rome, Versailles, Madrid: all the great European courts were fascinated by the new 'musica nova' style, which dreamed of a harmony beyond time and frontiers. With this recording, Jordi Savall sets a new standard by delivering the comprehensive vision of a repertoire for which he is already famous.

Ensemble La Romanesca AL ALVA VENID

One of the great attractions of Spanish court music of the 15th and 16th centuries is its unashamed use of themes from the popular tradition. It is music where joy is completely extroverted, where sorrow is pensive, and where expression of the passions is simple and direct. It reflects the self-conscious assertiveness of a new Spanish era, a pride in national values, and a disposition towards the enjoyment of local popular art. It was a period in which the poetic traditions of the romance and the villancico with their traditional melodies achieved the height of popularity among the highborn and, in turn, spawned new musical forms that were developed by musicians during the sixteenth century, particularly in the instrumental domain. Not all Spanish music of the period, however, is devoted to the celebration of the popular, and the secular music of the period should be seen in balance with the magnificent contribution to polyphonic music in the international style made by Spanish composers including Peñalosa, Morales, Guerrero and Victoria who worked under Church patronage to provide music for worship. 

The elevation of popular music to the status of art was not an isolated phenomenon, but an element of a broader panorama. The earliest manuscript relics of this tradition, the Cancionero Musical de Palacio, the Cancionero de la Colombina, and the Segovia and Barcelona manuscripts represent the period immediately following the marriage of the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand and Isabel, in 1469. The union of Castile and Aragon brought about by their marriage set the stage for further strengthening of Spain as a political unit. The nation was elevated, through unanimity of faith that was both a tool and a creed that fired the expulsion of the Moors and expansion through discovery. It is in this context that Ferdinand and Isabel decided to employ only Spanish musicians in their chapels. They encouraged music with simple structure and a strong national identity to reflect cultural self-confidence at a time when sophisticated contrapuntal artifice was becoming the vogue in elsewhere in Europe, particularly in the musical fashion centres of the Low Countries and in the Hapsburg dynasty into which they married their children Juan and Juana.

Ensemble La Romanesca’s Al alva venid covers some essential Spanish Renaissance repertoire with an all-stars line-up, in a set of interpretations which have set deep marks and are absolute references: here is Marta Almajano in her best singing moment, here is Paolo Pandolfo confirming his superior artistry, here are Juan Carlos de Mulder and Pedro Estevan in “de luxe” supporting roles, and of course here is José Miguel Moreno, the man who has probably been the finest translator of Renaissance secular Spanish music onto record. (GLOSSA)

Ensemble Kapsberger / Rolf Lislevand ALFABETO

The Alfabetos are guitar tablatures which were used until the end of the 18th century, they scored the chords as letters as jazz and rock music tablatures noxadays do. These simplified scores tell the essential, giving the players all the freedom to improv and use their virtuosity. For a long time, Rolf Lislevand played the electric guitar, some rock and a lot of jazz music and just a little bit of classical guitar to enter the conservatory. Pat Metheny leads him to jazz guitar, but the real hit comes from a lute concert by Hopkinson Smith. He starts learning how to play the lute and other early instruments. Ever since, he has shared his time between the baroque and the jazz or alternative stages along his improvisations. 'The baroque music offers much room, there is always air around it' (Rolf Lislevand): Alfabeto proves that baroque music was born in the street, that it was above all a music to dance (folias,...), basically intended to entertain people...His musicians in his ensemble are virtuoso improvisers, they dare everything with as much freedom as possible. Three baroque guitars phrase, nuance, launch solos and rhythms, they converse with Arianne Savall's aerial vocalizations, Pedro Estevna's imaginative drums or Bjorn Kyellemyr, one of Charlie Mingus's disciples, who leaves her his double bass for some colascione. (Naïve)

Rolf Lislevand NUOVE MUSICHE

Is it fair for baroque to sound so sensual? An elegiac soprano voice wafts above an instrumental piece by Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger. Flamenco rhythms underpin a passacaglia. Then suddenly we hear the typical harmonies and ornaments of Celtic folk music. Is that how this music really sounded in Italy in the early 1600s? Of course not. But what the Norwegian lutenist and guitarist Rolf Lislevand and his six colleagues bring off on Nuove musiche, their début album for ECM, has all the earmarks of a manifesto. Their vibrant and literally unheard-of readings of early baroque music from Italy are meant to grab the listener directly, as if it really were 'new music'.
'For years people tried to play early music as closely as possible to the way it was played at its time of origin', Lislevand explains 'But that's a philosophical self-contradiction. The first question is whether it's possible at all to replicate the performance of a musician who lived centuries ago. As far as I'm concerned, reconstruction is not really interesting at all. Do we really want to act as if we hadn't heard any music between 1600 and the present day? I think that would be dishonest. With this recording we say goodbye once and for all to early music's authenticity creed.'
This doesn't mean that anything goes - on the contrary. Lislevand, who learned his craft at the famous Schola Cantorum in Basle, has been professor of lute and historical performance practice at Trossingen Musikhochschule since 1993. He has turned out many prize-winning recordings, some of them with his Kapsberger Ensemble, which forms the core of the musicians on Nuove Musiche. He avidly scrutinises every available scrap of information on what he plays and how to play it properly. But those are only the preconditions for a convincing performance. After all, one vital element in baroque music was improvisation: 'Pieces were played to meet the needs of the moment', Professor Lislevand points out. 'To play strictly according to the notes on the page would be tantamount to lying, for the scores were written in a sort of shorthand. They presuppose a good deal of knowledge and self-assurance from the player.'
Take the percussion instruments, for instance. We know they were used, but nobody around 1600 bothered to write down the parts. So we have no way of knowing for sure how they were used. Did they only serve as timekeepers, or was their timbre exploited as well? Lislevand has very strong views on the subject: 'The idea that it wasn't until today that we could freely express our feelings is not only naive but arrogant. Personally I believe that the people of the 17th century were much richer and more self-aware than we assume today.' It is only natural, then, that the percussionist Pedro Estevan offers a huge range of expressive sounds and rhythms on Nuove musiche.
Lislevand searches for points of contact between the 400-year-old pieces on this recording (by Kapsberger, Pellegrini, Piccinini and others) and the musical horizons of today's performers. Usually the starting point is the passacaglia, a set of increasingly dramatic variations on an unchanging bass pattern. Passacaglias formed the core repertoire of the lute and guitar books of the 17th century. 'They thrive on chromaticism, harsh dissonances and offbeat rhythms. If the composers tried to get these effects, then we have every right to go even further. My idea is simply to develop and elaborate things already there in the material. Arianna Savall's melody really does come from the Kapsberger toccata itself. Everything there that smacks of echoes from current popular music is already contained in the pieces. I just coax it out.' (ECM Records)