That was my tagline for the Facebook entry for the Chandos Singers’ recent concert of Latin American baroque music. This covered some of the same ground as the Latin American concert I sang with the Exultate Singers a while back. In fact, three of the same pieces reappeared, so maybe a standard concert repertory for this area is emerging already, at least for vernacular pieces. Anyway there was some variety as the interpretations this time round weren’t necessarily similar.
The Latin sacred pieces, by Franco and de Padilla (including his Mass Ego flos campi), were all new to me. For the second concert in a row we sang a setting of the Marian litany, a text whose repetitiveness is clearly a challenge to composers. Here it was varied rhythms which were used to make it interesting.
I still don’t have much of a picture of what conditions were like for the composers of these pieces. Were they working on their own in a remote church in a clearing hacked out of the jungle, with no contact with other composers and not seeing any recently published music – so forced to go their own way? Or were they the first down at the docks when a ship came in from Spain bearing editions of the latest choral works from Europe?
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