This is yet another first-rate reissue from Hyperion. Music,
performances, presentation and ridiculously low price all combine
to make this erstwhile award-winner even more desirable than when
it first appeared; if you didn’t buy it then at full price, there’s
no excuse not to do so now. If I hadn’t already made several
Gothic Voices reissues Bargain of the Month, this would be joining
them, but others deserve to get a look in, too. My only question
is, what took so long? This, and several other Gothic Voices
reissues which have yet to appear were announced as long ago as
the 2006/7 Penguin Guide Yearbook. I now look forward
to the reappearance of all those other CDs, too.
The repertoire here is, perhaps, a little better
known now than it was in 1993, thanks, of course, in part, to
this recording. A search of a major online supplier’s website,
however, for ‘Encina’ produced just two hits. ‘Narvaez’ was
more productive – 14 hits, including a Naxos CD devoted entirely
to the vihuela music of Narvaez and Milan – but it’s clear that
this Hyperion reissue still has an important part to play. Of
the music on the disc, only the anonymous and very catchy Dindirín
(track 8) is at all well known.
As on previous Gothic Voices recordings, Christopher
Page has held to his belief that such music is best presented
unaccompanied, albeit with purely instrumental interjections,
here from Andrew Lawrence-King (harp) and Christopher Wilson
(vihuela). New listeners may be surprised at this, since the
general practice is to perform such music accompanied, but the
weight of evidence is on Page’s side. He is, indeed, himself
something of a renaissance man, contriving to keep scholarly
and practical interests in literature and music alive, when
most of us struggle to keep up with the most recent research
and publications in our own small areas of speciality – in my
case, I can’t even keep up with the annual digests of what has
been written on late-medieval and renaissance English literature.
The other aspect of the reissue which may well
surprise listeners is the blend of religious and secular material,
but it is almost a commonplace that the late-medieval and renaissance
world generally refused to compartmentalise the two: a poem
to the Virgin Mary may easily be transformed into the praise
of the human beloved or a chanson d’aventure be transferred
from the courtly love tradition to the religious. The painting
chosen for the cover of the CD neatly demonstrates this refusal
to divide the religious and the secular – Adam being expelled
from the Garden of Eden for his sins is transformed into the
emaciated Christ, the second Adam, as if he were being taken
down from the cross after suffering for those very sins. Hence
the title of the CD, the Voice in the Garden being that of God
after Adam and Eve have transgressed.
If this kind of symbolism and the fact that the
singing is unaccompanied makes the recording sound austere,
nothing could be further from the truth. Everything here has
a ready appeal and the interspersing of the instrumental pieces,
on the harp and the vihuela, one of the ancestors of the Spanish
guitar, makes for real variety.
As for the religious
pieces, in Spanish as well as Latin, or a macaronic of the two,
as in Por las sierras (tr.6), none of them is boringly
pious – listen to the extract from track 10, the opening of the
anonymous Ave Maria, on the Hyperion website
to hear what a beautiful piece this is; then try the opening of
the following track, the love song Yo creo by Gabriel Mena
de Texerana, in which the lover’s pain is contrasted with the
liveliness of the music and the pun in the juxtaposition of dió
and Dios: ‘I believe that God [Dios] gave [dió]
you no good thing/that wasn’t designed to give me pain’. If I’ve
expressed reservations in earlier Gothic Voices reviews about
the suitability of the music for someone coming fresh to the repertoire,
I have no such reservations here.
Did I say that the performances are excellent and
the recording just right? If you’ve read any of my earlier
reviews of Gothic Voices, you’ll know that these things can
be taken for granted.
As usual, the reissue
is as well presented as the original, which it matches in all
respects except for the slightly reduced version of the original
cover painting. The notes, by Christopher Page and Tess Knighton,
are, as usual, a model of how to impart scholarly information
to the general reader. Inevitably, in such a short span, terms
such as ‘homophonic’ and ‘humanist’ in the renaissance, not the
modern sense of that word, have to go unexplained. Hyperion even
generously make the sleeve notes and artwork available on their
website,
presumably for the benefit of those who have downloaded the recording.
Unless, however, you can find the recording available as a download
for less than the £7.99 which iTunes regularly charge for all
Hyperion recordings, whether full- or budget-price, stick with
the CD – available from Hyperion for £6.99 and from some other
suppliers for even less.
I mustn’t delay you
any longer in placing your order for this reissue.
Brian Wilson
Andrew Lawrence-King
(harp)*; Christopher Wilson (vihuela)** 
