Jose Marin

José Marin was one of the most prolific composers of tonos humanos (profane songs in Romance languages) of the Spanish Baroque period. His works were disseminated all over the world and one of his complete manuscripts is called the Fitzwilliam Manuscript and is in Cambridge. The songs were traditionally accompanied by harp or guitar.

This disc from the Bogotá, Colombia-based ensemble Música Ficta jumps on the fast-moving bandwagon carrying Baroque music from Latin America. It is billed, with unnecessary specificity, as covering "Feast and Devotion in High Peru of the seventeenth century," but like other releases in this general repertoire it ranges widely, including music from other Latin American countries and from Spain itself, and covering music of several centuries. The subtitle is a bit misleading but not seriously annoying, for all this music traveled quite a bit in its time, and all the lands that are individual countries today were simply part of New Spain.

With a capaciously-filled boxset of a dozen CDs made up of attractive individual programmes and entitled The Spanish Guitar, Glossa reintroduces the superb playing of José Miguel Moreno. And with recordings from 1991-2004 which still sound fresh and vivid today. A new essay and all the sung texts are included in the physical booklet that completes this limited-edition set.

José Miguel Moreno contrasts the uniqueness of the Angelica with the usual sound of the small theorbo.​ The differences in terms of resonance are indeed amazing, especially since the soloist does well with it to play out the musical lines on both instruments and to make broad gestures.