Programme
Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611)
Hymn Ave Maris stella, 4 voices
Motet Vidi speciosam, 6 voices
Missa Vidi speciosam: Kyrie, 6 voices
Missa Vidi speciosam: Gloria, 6 voices
Antiphon Sancta Maria succurre miseris, 4 voices
Missa Vidi speciosam: Credo, 6 voices
Motet Ne timeas Maria, 4 voices [solo]
Missa Vidi speciosam: Sanctus, 6 voices
Missa Vidi speciosam: Agnus, 6 voices
Communion motet: Domine, non sum dignus, 4 voices and for Cantus
Motet Senex puerum portabat, 4 voices
Motet Gaude Maria Virgo, 5 voices
Motet Quam pulchri sunt, 4 voices
Antiphon Alma Redemptoris Mater, 5 voices
Motet Vadam et circuibo civitatem, 6 voices
Motet Nigra sum, 6 voices
Performers
Raquel Mendes, soprano
Axelle Bernage, soprano
Daniel Folqué, alto
João Moreiras, tenor
Alberto Palacios tenor
Hugo Oliveira, bass
Jorge López-Escribano, organ
Albert Recasens, director
Programme Notes
Tomás Luis de Victoria (ca. 1548–1611) is perhaps the most universal of all Spanish Renaissance composers. Although today his name is closely associated with cathedral music, in fact he was something of an outsider in the Iberian musical landscape: he never held major chapel master positions in cathedrals, and his works were not always easily incorporated into official repertoires. Trained as a choirboy in Ávila, he moved when he was very young to Rome, where he entered the Collegium Germanicum and became immersed in the musical life of the Counter-Reformation. There he encountered Palestrina and soon emerged as one of the great names of Roman polyphony.
Victoria published fifteen volumes of music between 1572 and 1605, all meticulously edited, which ensured the wide circulation of his works in Italy, Germany, and Spain. His style is marked by expressive intensity and textual clarity, a perfect balance between the spirituality of Trent and the rich sonorities inherited from the Spanish tradition. After more than twenty years in Rome, he returned to Madrid, where he served as chaplain and musician at the convent of Las Descalzas Reales in the service of Empress Maria of Austria. He remained there until his death in 1611.
The Missa Vidi speciosam is one of his most celebrated works. Published in Rome in 1592, it is based on his own motet of 1572 for the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, drawing on poetic images from the Song of Songs: the rose, the lily, the dove. In this Mass and in the Marian motets that accompany it, Victoria sublimates the sensual imagery of the ancient Hebrew poem into a musical language of transcendent beauty.
Biographies
La Grande Chapelle
La Grande Chapelle is a vocal and instrumental early music ensemble whose main objective is to revive forgotten works from the Spanish musical repertoire. The ensemble has taken part in the most important Spanish music seasons and performed at the festivals of Antwerp, Noirlac, Thiérache, Saintes, Herne, Cremona, Stockholm, La Valletta, Utrecht or Guanajuato, amongst others.
Upon its foundation in 2005, La Grande Chapelle set up its own independent record label, Lauda, which specialises in recordings of great musical and musicological interest. It has focused on two principal areas: an exploration of the relationship between the music and literature of the Spanish Golden Age and the revival of works by the most outstanding Spanish renaissance and baroque composers through first-time recordings, particularly those that set a particular work or composer within a specific context.
Recordings by La Grande Chapelle on the Lauda label have received several prestigious national and international awards and prizes, including “5 of Diapason”, “Excepcional” in the magazine Scherzo, “Choc de Classica”, “Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik” (PdSK) - and the “Editor's Choice” and “Critic’s Choice” in the celebrated British magazine Gramophone.
Albert Recasens
Upon finishing his music studies in Tarragona, Barcelona, Bruges and Ghent he took a degree in musicology at the Catholic University of Louvain where he graduated with a PhD on 18th century stage music in Madrid.
In 2005 he began an ambitious project for the recovery of forgotten or overlooked Spanish music with the founding of La Grande Chapelle and the Lauda record label. This brought to light unreleased works from some of the great composers of the 17th and 18th centuries (A. Lobo, J. P. Pujol, C. Patiño, J. Hidalgo, C. Galán, S. Durón, J. García de Salazar, F. Valls, J. de Nebra, A. Rodríguez de Hita, F. J. García Fajer, J. Lidón, etc.) in the form of premieres or first-time recordings. Among the theatre music premieres we must mention Calderón’s Universal Peace auto sacramental, Ramón Garay’s opera A Concise Compendium of the Spanish Revolution (1815) and the Fortunes of Andromeda and Perseus (1653) by Calderon and Hidalgo.
Since September 2019 he is “Bonds, creativity and culture” researcher at the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarre.