HUELGAS ENSEMBLE - Christoph Kolumbus - Import CD

Credits:

HUELGAS ENSEMBLE

Description:

The Music Columbus Heard: Tracing the Trail of a Rare Adventurer in 15th- and 16th-Century European Music. Paul van Nervel and the Huelgas Ensemble's new release features music from Italy, Portugal, and Spain in the late 15th and early 16th centuries that Christopher Columbus (ca1451-1506), known for his discovery of the New World, would have heard during his adventures. Besides his four famous voyages between 1492 and 1504, Columbus spent most of his life in the arid lands, especially Spain. As the album title "Christopher Columbus' Ear" suggests, the album takes the listener on a journey through the European music of the time, as if to retrace the explorer's life, beginning with his childhood in Italy. The album opens with an Italian song. Visin, visin, visin," a carnival song of unknown authorship, is for four voices, and its lyrics are a joke about chimney sweeps.Tromboncino's "Se ben or non scopri" is a perfect example of a flottola (a type of secular song popular in Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries). Columbus then encounters Spanish secular music. This is in stark contrast to Italian secular music, which has a subdued, melancholic character. The decisive moment in the explorer's encounter with Spanish composers came in May 1486, when he was granted an audience with the Catholic kings of Cordoba. Since then, he has increasingly penetrated the Ferdinand and Isabella families, visiting them frequently. In Seville, Cordoba, Madrid, and Valladolid, Ferdinand and Isabella had a variety of musicians. The music that Columbus heard was that which was composed and performed by musicians of Spanish descent. The majority of the music is secular, but it is characterized by a passionate and melancholic delicacy that is the result of an exquisite fusion of simple lyrics and music. Religious works resonate in the Seville Cathedral, where the music is original, rhythmic, and polyphonic in texture, in the tradition of the Franco-Flemish musical school.This performance, reproduced on the basis of the research of Nevel, a well-known musicologist and authority on Flemish polyphony, is performed by the Wellgus Ensemble in soothingly beautiful harmony. Sony Music

Tracklisting:

1.Visin, visin, visin a 4
2.Da pacem Domine a 4
3.Se ben or non scopri a 4
4.Rio de Sevilla a 3
5.De mi perdida esperanca a 3
6.Tre morillas m'enamoran a 3
7.Alla se me ponga el sol a 4
8.Los bracos trayo cansados a 2 & 3
9.La tricotea a 3
10.Missa "Malheur me bat" a 4~Agnus Dei
11.Amor con fortuna a 4
12.Missa "J'ay pris amours" a 4~Sanctus
13.Missa "J'ay pris amours" a 4~Agnus Dei
14.Dime, triste coracon a 2, 3 & 4