Mudarra

In her first solo album as a singer and harpist, Arianna Savall introduces us to a repertoire from the medieval and Baroque periods performed with seven different historical harps. The music comes from three countries where the harp has held a prominent position in cultural life: Italy, France, and Spain, in which the harp experienced a flowering of unique variety and beauty. Arianna Savall with her crystalline voice and her sweet playing, reaches the depths of these distant but at the same time so timeless music.

The American lutenist, Hopkinson Smith, began as a teenager he began to study the classical guitar and in his early 20's, he became acquainted with the lute which he started to learn by himself. He majored in musicology at Harvard and graduated with honors in 1972. In 1973, Hopkinson Smith came to Europe to devote himself to the lute in earnest. He worked in Catalonia with Emilio Pujol, a profound pedagogue in the 19th century tradition who instilled in him a sense for higher artistic values, and in Switzerland with Eugen Dombois whose sense of happy organic unity between performer, instrument and historic period has had a lasting effect on him. From the mid 1970's, he was involved in various ensemble projects including the founding of the ensemble Hespèrion XX and a ten-year collaboration with Jordi Savall. This collaboration led to important experiences in chamber music which were a creative complement to his work as a soloist.

With a capaciously-filled boxset of a dozen CDs made up of attractive individual programmes and entitled The Spanish Guitar, Glossa reintroduces the superb playing of José Miguel Moreno. And with recordings from 1991-2004 which still sound fresh and vivid today. A new essay and all the sung texts are included in the physical booklet that completes this limited-edition set.

An important part of European music at the time of the Renaissance was the art of varfattsn. One need only recall the virtoostic art of ornamentatioo practised in Italy, or Spanish composers such as Cahezon, Milan, Mudarra or Ortia, with their diferencias, recercaden and glosas. The sources were very often folksongs and folk dances, from whose originally improvised accompaniments instrumental forms developed, such as diferencias over well-known folk tones, or variations based on dance forms, like the pavan, passamezzo or the follia, among others.

Wounderfull recording by Paola Erdas of the Intavolatura of Valente, first music book exclusively dedicated to harpsichord, played on two XVIth century Napolitan instrument of an extraordinary beauty.