Esta Dulzura Amable – Sacred cantatas

Sjoerd Staal — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

About a year ago, in the ferocious August heat, I discovered Ambel. Travelling around the province of Zaragoza, searching for an ideal location to recreate the music of José Melchor Baltasar Gaspar de Nebra y Blasco (from Calatayud). Being Godly music with pious texts, the most appropriate place would be a temple. I was looking for a church impregnated with the spirit of Saragossan baroque art; something that would be an added inspiration to that of our work. Naturally, the site had to comply with the necessary acoustic quality, in accordance with the repertoire that we would record, able to do justice to these pieces so filled with minute details and subtle nuances. The Hermitage of Our Lady of the Rosary in Ambel, at the foot of the Moncayo mountain, attracted me with its typical Aragonese blend and contrast of a sober exterior and rich interior. With its dim and fickle lights, with the purity of its materials and with the equilibrium -so difficult to achieve- between space and decor. There are few places like this, where these revived pieces, several of which (the cantatas) surprisingly enough, remained unpublished until I had the great fortune of discovering them overseas.
Fifteen years ago, my research on Spanish baroque music led me on to the trail of some American archives where -I suspected- I would be able to find some interesting collections of music from the Iberian Peninsula. I crossed the Atlantic and the results far exceeded what I had imagined. Not only did I find numerous and indeed interesting sheet music, but as a result of my journey I discovered that the soul of those antique scores remained unexpectedly alive. Mexican folklore, for example, is a vivid portrait -with the inevitable influences of later centuries- of the music that was made in the old New Spain up to the eighteenth century. The Central American people were dazzled -according to the missionaries’ chronicles- by the richness of Spanish music, which they immediately adopted as their own.

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Esta Dulzura Amable – Sacred cantatas