Just listening to soprano María Cristina Kiehr in her early collaborations with Gabriel Garrido is a sheer pleasure! Garrido is the big “discoverer” of music created in Latin America after the arrival of the “conquistadores” – this music bears strong traditional flavours, while at the same time reflecting the strong influences from Spain (especially) and Portugal. A big line-up of fine singers and instrumentalists supports the reconstruction of an essential repertory.
The reissue game continues. All of this material has been available more or less continuously in recent years, with the exception of Frühbeck's Three-Cornered Hat, which only resurfaced quite recently on an EMI twofer accompanied by Atlántida. The reason it reappears here, evidently, stems from the fact that this two-disc set contains all of Victoria de Los Angeles' stereo Falla recordings; and despite the fact that she sings for about 60 seconds in total in "Hat", it's always a pleasure to hear Frühbeck's big-hearted, expansively Romantic but always exciting way with the music.
Francisco Lopez Capillas was born in 1608 in Mexico City, and studied plainchant and polyphonic composition at the Royal and Pontifical University before assuming the post of chorister and second organist at Puebla Cathedral in 1641. Although most of his significant works were composed toward the end of his life–and thus well into what is generally regarded as the baroque period–the Messe de la Bataille is, like many of his other works, ambiguous in its relationship to the musical innovations that were taking place in the old world at the time.
No musician has done more for this music than the Argentine director of Ensemble Elyma, Gabriel Garrido. Garrido has an impressive discography on the French label K617. K617 recordings can sometimes be frustrating because they rarely provide English translations to the obscure texts of much of this music. No matter, you can’t go wrong with any of the recordings Garrido has made with his excellent Ensemble Elyma.