This C.D. unveils for us after 340 years of slumber, this magnificent masterpiece by Juan Gutiérrez Padilla, chapel master of Puebla’s cathedral. Written for double choir the grandiose Missa Ego Flos Campi represents the height of Gutiérrez Padilla’s musical productions. This historical performance on period instruments and historical organs is one of many fruits of four decades of musicological research by E. Thomas Standford in the archives of Mexican City and Puebla cathedrals.
Chicago's best-known early music ensemble The Newberry Consort exhilarates with VESPERS, a collection of dazzlingly original music for women’s voices. The composer? A mysterious early-17th-century Mexican named Juan de Lienas, whose style energetically oscillates between Renaissance and Baroque elements.
Chicago's best-known early music ensemble The Newberry Consort exhilarates with VESPERS, a collection of dazzlingly original music for women’s voices. The composer? A mysterious early-17th-century Mexican named Juan de Lienas, whose style energetically oscillates between Renaissance and Baroque elements.
For those of us who are lucky enough to have been able to travel in space and time with Jordi Savall as members of his ensembles and to learn from each of his projects, launching a new programme with the figure of the outstanding Basque navigator Juan Sebastián Elcano to guide us on a musical journey through his world and his times is a congenial task. The premise is clear and the principle is a simple one: music is the quintessential universal language, which has united remote peoples through the ages, as it still does today. The same man who, 500 years ago, took part in an expedition commanded by Ferdinand Magellan to find the Spice Islands for the Crown of Castile, and who despite having established a landmark in universal history by circumnavigating the Earth, is nowadays unknown in much of the world, and yet provides us with a perspective on the past which enhances our enjoyment and understanding of the present.
Under the expert fingers of Jean-Charles Ablitzer, the Iberian organ of Grandvillars, confirms its extraordinary expressive, spatial and sonorous qualities. The thought of the interpreter resuscitates the whole imagination of the organist composers in Spain: the colors shine; fluid and precise, the game emphasizes this aesthetic contrasts very sharp, biting, conducive to the event of the orchestral organ, able to move as to seize by the force of its spatialized spectrum.
This box set comprises eight discs recorded by the remarkable Jordi Savall with his wife Montserrat Figueras and the wonderful Hespèrion XX. They span a period of ten or so years from 1976 were originally issued on LP by Virgin Classics. Since those days Savall’s performances have matured and grown in confidence but one can still easily recognize the brains behind the outfit and the sound-world he wanted to create. Later he moved to Auvidis Astrée and in more recent times has set up his own label - Alia Vox - where he really has been set loose. He has produced discs with superb documentation which have investigated many forgotten corners of medieval and Renaissance music which quite often we never even knew existed.
As court organist to Queen Isabella as well as the music teacher of her children with Charles V Antonio de Cabezon was perfectly placed to become the most important composer of the Spanish Golden Age of the 16th century. This complete recorded survey celebrates his remarkable body of work as well as his unique style and mastery.