Tomás Luis de Victoria is definitely one of the most important composers in the music history of Spain. His masterpiece is the ‘Officium Defunctorum’, published in Madrid in 1605. In this requiem – written for the funeral of Maria of Austria, daughter of Emperor Charles V – the composer reached a mystical intensity of expression.
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.
Although the large box and the Sacred Works title might lead you to expect a complete collection of Tomás Luis de Victoria's sacred music, that's not what it is, and in fact some famous pieces, such as the Requiem in six parts, are not included. Instead, conductor Michael Noone lists the criteria for inclusion as follows: the collection focuses on works Victoria composed in Madrid, works that are preserved in manuscripts, works or versions of works that have never been recorded, and works involving an organ or winds, or written in sections that alternate with chant.
Considerado como el más grande polifonista español, Tomás Luis de Victoria compuso su famoso Officium Hebdomadae Sanctae en Roma, donde se publicó en 1585, poco antes de su regreso definitivo a España. El conjunto La Colombina, en su versión original de los años 90 (María Cristina Kiehr, Claudio Cavina, Josep Benet y Josep Cabré), interpreta aquí una selección de las músicas para el Viernes Santo, grabación que se completa con una sorprendente Pasión según San Juan de un contemporáneo de Victoria, Joan Pau Pujol. Esta grabación se publicó por primera vez en el sello Accent en 1997.
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 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.
En las paginas de este libro, el pastor Harold Caballeros comparte sus experiencias e investigaciones sobre las maneras en que la iglesia en Guatemala esta obteniendo la victoria en la guerra espiritual que enfrenta. Conoce los relatos de soldados de Dios que han vencido y ahora pueden transformar la vida de futuras generaciones con sus testimonios.
Tomás Luis de Victoria was born in 1548 in Avila, the birthplace of St Teresa. Just as she seems to personify the religious ethos of sixteenth-century Spain (the good side of it, at least), so Victoria came to embody the best of the Spanish character in music. As a youth he learnt his art as a chorister at the Cathedral of Avila. So promising was he that he was sent to Rome at seventeen years of age, patronised by Philip II and by the Church, to study at the Jesuits’ Collegium Germanicum…
The liturgy of the Dead – including the Requiem Mass, the Burial Service and the Office of the dead, properly speaking – was granted considerable importance by the Spanish ecclesiastical authorities and by the local church composers from very early times. Throughout the Middle Ages, according to the extant documentary descriptions, the death of a great Lord, such as the Count of Barcelona or the sovereign of any of the Spanish kingdoms of León, Castile, Aragon or Navarre, was usually mourned with impressive ceremonies in which the solemnity of the liturgy was often enhanced by the addition of the planctus, a kind of lengthy optional lament that was sung monophonically and of which several examples have survived.