Various composers: Moon, Sun & All Things, Baroque Music from Latin America

In these days when we lament the absence of high-quality music-making in so many of our churches, it is ironic to think that the conquering Spaniards in the seventeenth century found good music a powerful tool in converting the indigenous populations of the New World to Catholicism. The resources devoted to many of the cathedrals are, to our eyes, astonishing: thirty-five musicians worked in the cathedral at La Plata (now Sucre, in Bolivia), while in Puebla Cathedral in Mexico Padilla worked with a choir of 14 boys and 28 men and a continuo of organ, harp and bass viol, supplemented as necessary by recorders, cornetts, sackbuts et al.

Jeffrey Skidmore’s researches in the Americas have unearthed a veritable treasure-trove of music, and his second disc drawn from this source is a dazzling feast of accompanied and a cappella choral music. The programme follows that of a Latin American Vespers service of the seventeenth or eighteenth century, where the set liturgical works were interspersed with more popular music such as villancicos (where, in the words of a contemporary commentator, “worship and true faith are set aside to attend to the pleasures of the senses, to flatter the ear and the vain appetites of the congregation”).

From the opening drum beats of the extraordinarily noble and haunting processional, with its skilful mix of Inca and Christian imagery, the listener is drawn into a world far removed from northern European constraints. Padilla’s effervescent Deus in adiutorium, Capillas’s Laudate Dominum and Araujo’s riotous Ay, andar! bubble over with joy, while Hernandez’s sacred motet Sancta Maria, e! is a soothing gem of unaccompanied choral writing. The disc takes its title from Capillas’s motet “He whom moon, sun and all things obey in their appointed time, within the virgin’s womb is borne endowed with every heavenly grace.”

The music, the variety and imagination of the orchestrations and the spirited singing and playing leave one feeling almost bereft when the last strains of the hypnotic and exquisite final Dulce Jesús mío have died away. This disc definitely makes it into my Top Three choral discs for 2005! (For the record, the other two are the Monteverdi Choir’s Santiago a cappella featuring choral music by Victoria, Guerrero et al (yet another stunning John Eliot Gardiner offering), and Ex Cathedra’s recording of Latin motets by Martin Peerson, although I would also rank all the new Gardiner Bach Cantata series alongside them!)