Delia Agúndez (sopran / soprano)
Víctor Sordo (tenor)
Sara Ruiz (viola da gamba / viol)
Laura Casanova (čembalo / harpsichord)

About the concert programme
The programme includes unknown and rare pieces from the Spanish musical heritage, most of them profane. It is a type of music that was cultivated in the nobles’ houses, theatres, the Royal house, chapels, and the court, which until 1700 housed the Habsburg dynasty and later the Bourbons.

All musical pieces are written for one or two voices with basso continuo, which is an abbreviated formula of musical writing: the composer writes only the lines of the voices, and for the accompaniment only one pentagram that can be interpreted by several instruments, in our case the harpsichord and the violoncello, leaving much space for improvisation.

This year, 2016, is the 300th anniversary of the death of the Spanish composer Sebastián Durón (1600–1716), the pioneer of the Italian style in opera, which was to become popular after his time. The programme includes two of his pieces: one on a religious theme “Ay de mí, que el llanto y la tristeza” (“Alas, that crying and sadness”), which represents a constant in religious Spanish music, i.e. guilt that is unforgivable by God, who is felt as inflexible. The second theme is a fragment of an opera that Regina Iberica has recovered for our most recent record: “The twelve musicians of Iriarte” (2015), with its characteristic mythological figures.

The core of the programme groups comic or lighter pieces with comic themes, dialogues of popular characters distanced from nobility and from the feelings of mythological figures (love is paid by love, it is better paid by money). The characters used to be servants, estranged from epic feelings and eternal love.

Music from the Spanish Baroque plays with syncopation, alternation of beats, strong and abutted rhythms, popular forms such as couplets and refrains, while the texts also play with contrasts: “oh yes / oh no”, “I want to die / I want to live”, “to live is to die / to die is to live”, “ah sweet deceit, ah traitor praise”; there is much presence of the “ay” (“oh”) in both meanings: comic and filled with coquetry, or as a sign of profound grief.

We are confident that, despite the distance imposed by the language barrier, the musical pieces will touch the public because they reflect intense, vital contradictions: love as delicious torment and more important than death itself, or the vitality of coquetry. All presented with a sober music with few elements, stunning in its simplicity, powerful in its strength and passion, and touching in its tenderness.

Laura Casanova, direction and harpsichord