COMPOSERS: Anonymous,Cabezón,Pesaro,Torre,Willaert
LABELS: Virgin Veritas
WORKS: Popular Spanish music 1200-1700
PERFORMER: Hespèrion XX/Jordi Savall
CATALOGUE NO: VM5 61179 2 ADD (1976-78)
This early Spanish music is taken from recordings made by Hespèrion XX in the Seventies. The booklet (which contains neither the song texts nor their translations) tells us to expect the artistic, the exotic and the popular. For the artistic try Qu’es de ti? by Juan del Encina, sung with arch but telling intensity by Montserrat Figueras. For the exotic, smouldering Night Music of Moorish Spain try Paxarico tu te llamas.
The fun will come with Tres morillas, tooted pleasingly on the recorder (though missing the seductiveness captured by the King’s Singers in their vocal version for EMI in 1984). The demarcation between singers and players seems a little over-unionised on this disc, but they do come together for the full castanets-and-spilt-sangria effect in the anonymous and joyous Soy serranica. Anthony Pryer