Lia Serafini: soprano
Lorenzo Cavasanti: recorders
Antonio Fantinuoli: cello
Paola Erdas: harpsichord, direction

Programme:

Antonio de Cabezon (1510-1566):
Libro de Cifra Nueva para Tecla, Arpa y Vihuela:
Jesuchristo Hombre y Dios
(Alcalà de Henares, 1557)

Diego de Cásseda:
Solo al Santísimo

Sebastián Durón (1660 - 1716):
Tonada sola con flautas para soprano

Bartolomeo Montalbano (1600 – 1651):
Sinfonie:
Sinfonia "Sghemma"
(Palermo, 1629)

Tarquinio Merula (1594 - 1665):
Curtio precipitato et altri capricii:
Op. 13:
Or ch’e’ tempo di dormire
Venezia 1638

Sebastián Durón (1660 – 1716):
Cantada al Santísimo con Flautas

Antonio de Cabezon (1510 - 1566):
Obras de musica

Sebastián Durón (1660 - 1716):
Cantada a voz sola al Santísimo y de Pasion:
Fray Antonio Martin y Coll – Anonimous
Tonos de Palacio
Cancion

Juan del Vado:
Tonada a San Francisco

Bartolomè Selma y Salaverde:
Canzoni Fantasie et Correnti:
Canzona a doi, basso e soprano
(Venezia 1638)

Giovanni Felice Sances:
Stabat Mater
 

About the Programme:

The Baroque Culture Of Beauty In The Spanish Mediterranean

The “Siglo de Oro” is an extremely convenient category to use in defining that extraordinary brilliance enjoyed by the arts in Spain mid-way between two awkward chronological limits, the Renaissance and the baroque. From halfway through the 16th to the latter half of the 17th century, for the first time in history the Iberian peninsula imposed upon Europe its role not just as a hegemonic military force but also as the engine room of artistic activities. The Mediterranean dominions of Spain benefited from, but also contributed enormously to the creation of this unrepeatable fortune of the Iberian muses
The predominant aspects of the musical landscape of that Iberian-Mediterranean society are easily recognisable: sacred music for voices and instruments on the one hand, and music for consumption – common to the masses and to the elite – in the form of dances for one or more musical instruments. The presumed artistic interchange between musicians of the various Mediterranean shores is instead a rare, if not almost insignificant, phenomenon. There are few Italian musicians of note in Spain, and even fewer Iberian ones in the south of Italy (the presence of capellmeister Galan in Sardinia being an exception). And yet, the musical repertories and formulae for improvisation used to circulate widely. It is thus not surprising to find close links between the thousands of villancicos composed in baroque Spain and the motet for solo voice and instruments used in the 17th century in Naples or Palermo. The pattern of this religious composition is in both cases an alternation of strophes for solo voice and refrains for vocal and instrumental groups, with a strong rhythmic character. This pattern is broken, however, by the tonada, a sort of sacred aria based upon the melodic line of the canto and then developed through an Italian influence into the more articulated cantada. The purity of the vocal intonations, sometimes using popular texts, but more often taken from more rarefied literary sources, corresponds to that aesthetic ideal of spiritual eros represented to the greatest degree in the ecstasy of Bernini’s Saint Teresa. In territories dominated (obsessed) by the existential parameters of the sacred, beneath the eye of the Holy Inquisition, a lawful transgression nevertheless flourished in dance. There were dances in princely palaces and in processions along the streets, in the religious colleges and in the intimacy of town houses. Amongst the most common formulae used in putting together instrumental variations, including those not destined for dance, the passemezzo is certainly of Italian origin: the oldest reference is in a Venetian manuscript for the keyboard dated around 1530, but extensive cycles of variations on the passemezzo (in the two antico variations in minor key and moderno in major key) can be found in the books printed by celebrated lute players of the second half of the 16th century, such as Giacomo Gorzanis, a southerner who moved north (“blind, from Puglia, resident in the town of Trieste”). Religious music also was pervaded by obsessive rhythms (ground bass) whose origins were attributed, not always with justification, to the Hispano-American colonies. It is true that it was the Iberian peninsula that was the source of forms such as the folia or the various tenores, examples of which appeared in the collection published in 1553 by the Toledan Diego Ortiz, master of the Royal Chapel of Naples. It would appear, on the other hand, that the passacaglia (Castillian etymology: ‘pasar calle’, with a reference to the famous 16th-century villanella, ‘Chi passa per sta strada’) may have been born in Naples; the oldest forms, indeed, are anthologies for guitar compiled in Naples from the end of the 16th century. In the early 17th century, the passacaglia became one of the most heavily used forms to compose the first accompanied monodies, and soon they also entered the structure of the work in a recitative style (only the surname of the Roman singer and composer, Giovanni Felice Sanchez, preserves links with Spain). The only surviving 17th-century ‘Hispano-Sardinian’ song-book – that is, a collection of songs prevalently in Castillian (Milan, Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense, AC VIII 7) – does not include information about the music used, but nevertheless, thanks to the texts of Spanish villancicos alongside the popular songs in Sardinian logudorese and gallurese language, it helps prove a continuity in the oral tradition of the island up to the present day of elements of baroque musical culture of Spanish derivation. It is this line of research springing from the collaboration between musicians and musicologists that is the most fascinating: exploring the traces of continuity in a common culture.
Based on the booklet of the CD Hermosuras, written by Dinko Fabris.

Bio:
Janas ensemble was founded by Paola Erdas and Lorenzo Cavasanti in 1996. The group, which collaborated with the theatre and historical dance specialist Deda Colonna, soon became multi-instrumental, with the sound of the harpsichord augmented by voice,winds,strings and percussion, in performances combining poetry, dance and music of the late Renaissance and Baroque periods in the Mediterranean area.
The idea originates from the requirement to face a sixteenth and seventeenth century repertoire with a viewpoint centred on the historical deepening, in the widest sense of the term, in an aesthetics that never loses of sight the quest for the absolute beauty of the sound, a subject Paola Erdas has always cared very much about.
A framing that goes from the Janas, the mythological Sardinian fairies, to a wider horizon, a far-reaching one, sweeping from Italy to France and Spain to the rest of Europe.