Hesperion Ministriles Reales

Juan García de Salazar was a Spanish Baroque composer from the Basque country who spent most of his career working at Zamora Cathedral; he is so obscure the entry for him in the New Grove doesn't even include a list of his works. Musicologist Manuel Sagastume Arregi has pulled together a number of Salazar's extant movements related to the Vespers service with additional material to create Juan García de Salazar: Complete Vespers of Our Lady in Naxos' Spanish Classics series. It is performed by the Basque ensemble Capilla Peñaflorida and features the period wind group Ministriles de Marsias and the fine baritone of Josep Cabré. There are no stars here, though – everything on Juan García de Salazar: Complete Vespers of Our Lady is done to the service of the music, which is outstanding. Sagastume Arregi's realization of García de Salazar's Vespers service incorporates appropriate plainchant sections taken from a Basque hymnal dated 1692, organ music by García de Salazar's contemporaries José Ximenez and Martín Garcia de Olagüe, instrumental arrangements of García de Salazar's motets, and an arrangement of Tomás Luis de Victoria's Vidi speciosam probably made by García de Salazar himself.

English composer and violinist William Brade was a significant transitional figure in instrumental music between the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Brade is credited with transplanting English musical practices most readily associated with William Byrd, Peter Philips, and John Dowland to North German and Scandinavian soil, and in aiding the transformation from the Renaissance notion of the English consort to the more continental Baroque idea of a string orchestra.

This disc of Iberian and Latin American Renaissance music is a reissue cleverly disguised as a new release. It compiles music from several recordings by Catalonian visionary Jordi Savall, his luminous-voiced collaborator Montserrat Figueras, and his Hesperion XXI and Capella Reial de Catalunya ensembles, dressing them up with a new set of rather philosophical booklet notes on themes of change, of intercultural tolerance, and of the evolving nature of Christianity in the Iberian realm and in New Spain. Some might call this a cynical ploy, but actually Savall has always been moving in a circle, so to speak, spiraling inward toward a deeper musical understanding of the historical themes touched on here: the lingering effects of the legacy of medieval Iberia and its "mestissage" or mixture of cultures, the reign of Holy Roman Emperor Charles (Carlos) V (did you know that he was both the first monarch to be called "His Majesty" and the first to be honored with the claim that the "sun never set" on his empire?), and the relationships between cultivated and popular styles, both in Iberia and the New World.

Jenkins was relatively unknown, having spent most of his life quietly in the employ of wealthy landowners in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk up to the Restoration, when he took up a court appointment as a lutenist. His pupil-patrons Sir Nicholas and Roger L'Estrange and Roger North were, however, much quoted figures of the period.

Purcell’s fifteen Fantazias have come down to us as a manuscript kept at the British Museum, most of whose pieces are dated. As they would not have aroused any interest at the time, the young composer did not even attempt to have them published, and they only appeared in print, edited by Peter Warlock, in 1927! This unique collection of pieces of from three to seven parts, a true “sum” of polyphonic thinking, to which only Bach’s Musical Offering and Art of Fugue may be compared, are the product, incredible as it may seem, of a very young composer of twenty-one at the beginning of his all too-short career. Written during the summer of 1680, they bring two centuries of uninterrupted instrumental tradition in England to a crowning conclusion.

This new recording by Jordi Savall and his ensemble Hespèrion XXI enables us to discover the best pieces for consort of viols composed between 1500 and 1700. London, Venice, Rome, Versailles, Madrid : all the great European courts have been illuminated by this musica nova, this new style, dreaming of an harmony beyond time and frontiers. With this album, Jordi Savall sets a new standard by delivering the comprehensive vision of a repertoire he is already famous for.

This new multicultural project from Jordi Savall and his musicians on The Routes of Slavery (1444-1888) marks a world first in the history of music and of the three continents involved in the trade in African slaves and their exploitation in the New World, which are brought together through the early music of the colonial period, the musical traditions of Mali and the oral traditions of the descendants of slaves in Madagascar, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. This 'Musical Memoir' is accompanied with historical texts on slavery, beginning with the early chronicles of 1444 and concluding with texts written by the Nobel Peace Prize-winner Martin Luther King shortly before his assassination in 1968.

Listening to this selection of music from East and West so ingeniously put together by Jordi Savall is no ordinary experience. In addition to the aesthetic emotion, we feel another that is even more intense – a sense of magical communion with reconciled humanity.
One can’t help feeling that, with the simultaneous demise of both Sepharad and Al-Andalus in the second half of the 15th century, only forty years after the fall of Byzantium, some part of the human soul was also lost. Those events led to the destruction of intellectual and spiritual bridges between East and West that have never since been repaired. Once the fertile hub of our cultural universe, the Mediterranean became a battlefield and a barrier between peoples.

There is a certain attraction to music of the viola da gamba, but usually, a few tunes are enough. Not that the gamba is not a beautiful instrument: round and rich-toned, supremely sensitive to the touch, and sublimely evocative of the human voice, the gamba is arguably one of the most soulful instruments ever devised. But the repertoire for the gamba makes extended listening emotionally fatiguing. The French music veers from the sentimental to the suicidal, the German repertoire ranges from the dour to the dismal, and the English repertoire is so fatalistic as to hardly exist in this world. Thus, getting through a whole disc of the gamba is like playing Russian roulette: the more you play, the more likely it is that you'll come to grief. But not on this disc by Jordi Savall.

Discover the music of Heinrich Isaac with these authentic performances from La Capella Reial de Catalunya and Hespèrion XXI under the inspired direction of early music specialist Jordi Savall. This program paints a portrait of an era during which the Hundred Year's War ended, the Medici family reached its peak, the idea of the Reformation surged and Charles V was crowned at the head of an Empire that redefined the idea of Europe.