The Spirit of Gambo English Consort And Solo Viol Music (1570 1680) Hespèrion Xx, Jordi Savall

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.

The new album of consort music for viols in five parts by John Jenkins comes from an ensemble who has already been awarded two Diapason d’Or for their previous recordings on Musica Ficta: The Spirit of Gambo.

The chamber music on this recording was likely composed during the time Jenkins was living in the homes of the Dereham and L’Estrange families. Where Lawes 'music is often edgy and bizarre in character, Jenkins' compositions from this period are clearly intended to counterbalance the uncertain and risky circumstances that prevailed during the turbulent years of the Civil War. It's not for nothing that Andrew Ashbee, the great English Jenkins connoisseur, titled his book “The Harmonious Musick of John Jenkins”.

The name of the Spirit of Gambo viol consort comes from an old manuscript referring to the viola da gamba as a "Gambo Violl." It is interesting that absolutely nothing in the packaging of this release, at least in its U.S. version, identifies the ensemble as being from Chicago, or America at all. Be that as it may, the group delivers strong performances of some pieces that have been somewhat neglected within the viol consort repertoire.

In the monastic life of the Cistercian order, as in the case of the female monastery of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas (Burgos), a royal pantheon, the seat of coronations and the epicentre of a very intense musical life in which singing played an extremely important part, the nuns were called upon to live a life of simplicity, silence, prayer and contemplation. Flavit auster, which is part of the Las Huelgas Codex, is a Marian text inspired in the Song of Songs in which the most powerful symbols of femininity appear, such as the honeycomb, milk and honey, and protectiveness described as “mother of mercy, port of hope for the shipwrecked and virgin mother purified.”

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.