Cambridge Early Music played host in Jesus College Chapel on Wednesday evening to Cantoría, a vibrant, talented young quartet comprising Inés Alonso (soprano), Oriol Guimerá (Alto), Jorge Losana (Tenor) and Victor Cruz (bass), specialising in vocal polyphony of the Spanish Renaissance.
Award-winning Cantoría have performed in a wide variety of music festivals in Western Europe (15 different countries) and a US debut forthcoming, and have participated in artistic residencies such as the National Centre of Early Music in York.
Much of the wonderful music we heard on Wednesday evening was probably unfamiliar to many of us among the hugely appreciative audience. Cantoría have said that they want to bring Monteverdi’s intensity and the interpretative style of his madrigals to the music of the Iberian Peninsula and this gave a useful steer to the way we might expect to be listening to it.
Much of the evening’s programme was devoted to the work of Mateo Flecha (1481-1553?) and Juan del Encina 1488-1529). The latter, a poet, musician and playwright, wrote work associated with the courts of the Catholic monarchs, Charles V and Philip II, and Cantoría related some of the ancient songs of these courts (villancicos) to the ensaladas of Flecha.
Mateo Flecha composed his ensaladas (a medley or ‘mixed salad’) in the C16th. These were a mixture of pre-existing tunes and newly composed material, celebratory of life, often sung at Christmas and were, one might say, the ‘pop’ songs of the time, full of humorous topics and/or political commentary. They often reveal how ordinary human passions and emotions, even sometimes low ones, could be transformed in context and through elevated music in tone and colour with non-sacred content.
The evening’s performance was indeed a mixed salad of topics and Cantoría immediately stamped their hallmark of excellence on the first work we heard, a short Nativity piece of Flecha’s, full of lovely harmonies and memorably melodic.
There followed 3 more works on sacred themes, an anonymous piece (attributed to Flecha) ‘Ríu Ríu Chíu’, a traditional call of Basque shepherds with God as himself a good shepherd who is praised as a protector, a piece on the Incarnation, ‘Verbum caro factum est’, and a further piece whose lyrics are inspired by the Song of Solomon (‘Yo me so la mercenera’).
The song which followed, ‘El Fuego’ (the Fire), and which gave its name to the performance as a whole, referred to danger averted by the Blessed Virgin Mary, followed by a celebration of her, and then a call for water to kill evil in all its forms through Christ who dispenses the water of life.
Encina’s works that followed included ‘Oy Comanus’ a celebration of Carnival, literally a farewell to flesh [carnis vale] which must be consumed before the fasting of Lent beginning on the following day. There were a couple of life lessons central to one of which (‘Mais vale trusca’) was the importance of love which, without its presence is not to live at all, and sung by the group with a hushed, lyrical beauty and the deepest of feeling. ‘Cucú, cucú’, was a warning against cuckoldry in the cuckoo’s song which traditionally mocked a married man.
Cantoría returned to Mateo Flecha , el Viego the elder, to distinguish him from his younger nephew, also a composer of madrigals. ‘La Justa’, within the context of the victory of Charles V over the Ottomans at the Battle of Vienna celebrates the triumph of Christ (the second Adam) over Lucifer and the Fall of Man, and ‘La Bomba’ concluded the performance where Christ in a narrative of shipwreck is imaged as a saving vessel who rescues us all as from a foundering boat.
Cantoría are the perfect ensemble for this music. They communicate its drama with a sustained verve and through significant forms of expressiveness, including a variety of exchanges and hand gestures and, where required, an engaging turn of humour.
It was evident from the outset of their performance, both from the range and quality of their voices and their intelligent selection of material throughout, that Cantoría deserve to be among the foremost of those involved in the discovery and recovery of the Iberian polyphonic repertoire.
JOHN GILROY
