Luis Elizindo

Astor Piazzolla belongs to Buenos Aires and to the whole world as well. His music has that secret, that intangible charm and that dose of magic it takes to fascinate musicians and non-musicians alike, whatever their own styles and wherever they come from. His sharply-accented melodies and his lively, persistent rhythms with their ferocious attacks capture you and sweep you along. Then suddenly all that sonic aggression calms down in a slow section and his lyricism, his inexorable melodies, hit you inside. It's the tango, and it goes straight to the soul.

Since the great boom in Cuban son, Luis Frank has become one of the great names of the second generation who keep Cuban musical heritage alive far beyond its borders. The current album intends to demonstrate how Christmas is celebrated in Cuba and the whole of Latin America: just like we celebrate it here, contemplatively, but with lots of joy and dancing too. This is a Christmas CD with a difference that will enrich your Christmas festivities.

The works of Tomás Luis de Victoria are today an international paradigm of the Spanish Renaissance heritage. This master, born in Avila, rises like a standard-bearer from the huge spectrum of Spanish composers who carried the art of polyphony to its highest musical and liturgical significance.

Et Jesum presents motets, antiphons, and mass sections by the Spanish Renaissance composer Tomás Luis de Victoria, arranged for countertenor voice and accompanying stringed instrument. Both the laud (the Spanish version of the lute) and the more guitar-like vihuela are used by accompanist Juan Carlos Rivera. Rivera and countertenor Carlos Mena, a youthful alumnus of the Savall school, augment arrangements of Victoria's day with efforts of their own in a similar vein, and it would take a deep specialist indeed to pick out the 400-year-old ones.

The Norwegian six-member a cappella group, Nordic Voices here presents the extraordinary polyphonic music of Tomas Luis de Victoria, a Spanish composer whose music has continued to move people for more than 400 years, crossing geographical, cultural, and even religious barriers. This surround-sound recording comes ten years after a "warm, consistent and moving" (BBC Music) album of Lamentations, which featured pieces by sixteenth-century composers, including Four Lessons by Victoria.

The Tallis Scholars under director Peter Phillips have cultivated a cool, Apollonian sound in a cappella Renaissance vocal music that can be awe-inspiringly beautiful in Flemish polyphony, and especially in the spare English repertory for which they are named. This small, mixed-gender adult choir might not seem an ideal group to take on the darker hues of Tomás Luís de Victoria, but the set of Lamentations of Jeremiah recorded here, music for Holy Week, is quite well suited to their talents. As Phillips points out in his elegant notes (in English, German, and French), Victoria's "Spanish" style was largely forged in Rome, and his somberness was in many ways a personal rather than a national characteristic.