MusicWeb International One of the most grown-up review sites around 2023
Approaching 60,000 reviews
and more.. and still writing ...

Search MusicWeb Here Acte Prealable Polish CDs
 

Presto Music CD retailer
 
Founder: Len Mullenger                                    Editor in Chief:John Quinn             

REVIEW


Some items
to consider

new MWI
Current reviews

old MWI
pre-2023 reviews

paid for
advertisements

Acte Prealable Polish recordings

Forgotten Recordings
Forgotten Recordings
All Forgotten Records Reviews

TROUBADISC
Troubadisc Weinberg- TROCD01450

All Troubadisc reviews


FOGHORN Classics

Alexandra-Quartet
Brahms String Quartets

All Foghorn Reviews


All HDTT reviews


Songs to Harp from
the Old and New World


all Nimbus reviews



all tudor reviews


Follow us on Twitter


Editorial Board
MusicWeb International
Founding Editor
   
Rob Barnett
Editor in Chief
John Quinn
Contributing Editor
Ralph Moore
Webmaster
   David Barker
Postmaster
Jonathan Woolf
MusicWeb Founder
   Len Mullenger


Buy through MusicWeb
for £13.50 postage paid World-wide.

Musicweb Purchase button

 


Cantos de la España Antiqua (Songs of Ancient Spain)
ANONYMOUS (XVIth century) Rodrigo Martinez [1:26]
Avrix mi galanica (Sephardic song) [3:06]
Por que llorax blanka nina? (Sephardic song) [5:41]
Rahél (Sephardic song) [2:15]
ANONYMOUS (XVIth century) Ay linda amiga! [4:31]
Morena me llaman (Sephardic song) [3:44]
Cantigas de Amigo (Martin Codax, XIIIth century): Ondas do mar de Vigo Cantigo I) [4:56] ; Quantas sabedes amar amigo (Cantigo V) [1:30]; Aj Deus se sab’ora meu amigo (Cantigo IV) [3:52]
ANONYMOUS (XVIth century) Didirindin [2:21]
Alonso MUDARRA (c.1510-1580) Si viesse e me levasse [2:25]
Cançó del lladre (Catalan tune) [1:55]
Federico Garcia LORCA (1898-1936) Spanish Folk Songs from Canciones antiguas: Tarara [5:03]; La monja gitana [3:03]; Los pelegrinitos [4:11]; Las morillas de Jaén [2:45]
Hermana, hermana (Sephardic tune) [1:38]
Durme, durme (Sephardic song) [4:10]
Una matica de ruda (Sephardic song) [5:58]
Noches, noches… (Sephardic song) [4:04]
Dos amantes tengo la mi mama (Sephardic song) [3:04]
Los bilbilicos (Sephardic tune) [5:25]
Anna Jagielska (soprano); Marek Toporowski (harpsichord)
rec. Warsaw, 3-8 July 2000. DDD
Texts included. No translations
ACTE PRÉALABLE AP0060 [76:41]

Experience Classicsonline


 
My first surprise on receiving this CD for review was to find a programme of late-medieval and renaissance Spanish music emanating from a label which specialises in Polish music: the three volumes of early Polish keyboard works advertised in the booklet are more the kind of thing that I had expected. You can find a list of Acte Préalable recordings and, where they exist, links to Musicweb reviews of them here.
 
My second surprise was to receive for review now a CD which was first issued in 2004: I really haven’t been sitting on this review that long! In most respects, however, I have to agree that it was worth the wait.
 
There is no exactly comparable programme of this music, so I can’t offer any detailed comparison, other than to note that Montserrat Figuerras and Jordi Savall offer a number of similar CDs on their own Alia Vox label and that Naxos have a recording with Shirley Rumsey singing and accompanying herself on the renaissance guitar, Music of the Spanish Renaissance (8.550614). There is no overlap with the Naxos CD: you may regard that as a safer and less expensive way to dip your toe into this repertoire or as a next step if you like the Acte Préalable CD, as I believe that you will.
 
Anna Jagielska has a pleasant voice. She’s not quite as distinctive as Figueras or Rumsey – less powerful than either – and it takes her a few tracks to settle into the music, or for my ears to become accustomed to her style. From about track 4 onwards I really began to enjoy her singing. What her voice lacks in force, she makes up for with the yearning quality of her singing, in which respect she is not far behind Figueras. Try Ondas do mar de Vigo (track 7) for an example of what I mean.
 
She is well accompanied throughout by Marek Toporowski, who does his best to make his three harpsichords sound like the guitar or its relatives and predecessors which you might have expected in this repertoire. The notes acknowledge that the harpsichord would have been a novel instrument at the time when this music was composed. I think it would have been preferable to have used a renaissance guitar, as Rumsey does on Naxos, vihuela or lute for some of the pieces. 77 minutes of soprano and harpsichord is somewhat tiring, even when three different instruments are employed, especially as I understand that Jagielska is an accomplished guitarist – surely she could have accompanied herself in, say, the Sephardic songs.
 
The chosen repertoire is varied, though the music is mostly of a melancholy nature. The notes in the booklet take as motto for the whole collection the words of a sixteenth-century song: ‘There is no love without suffering, or pain so cruel as that experienced in love’. I would have welcomed a little greater variety of mood. Most of the pieces are unfamiliar, apart from the inevitable Dindirindin (track 10).
 
There is a predominance of the music of the Sephardic Jews, whose ladino music continued to be performed long after their expulsion from Spain alongside the Moors in 1492. Until the completion of the reconquista they had been equal members of Spanish society, though there is a hint of discrimination in some of these songs, for example in the familiar Morena me llaman (tr.6), where the girl’s dark Moorish skin is emphasised. She claims to have been born white and to have changed colour: yo blanca nací/.../mi color perdí. After 1492 even those who converted to Christianity, the conversos, were frequently the objects of discrimination and subject to the attentions of the Inquisition. Las morillas de Jaén (tr.16) are conversos: Cristianas qui éramos moras en Jaén – we’re Christian girls from Jaén who used to be Moors.
 
I’m not sure how many of the songs from the collection made by the poet Lorca, Cancioneras antiguas, have received editorial treatment, but Los pelegrintos (tr.15) sounds to me as if it has received some such attention. Lorca himself seems to have written the words of La monja gitana (tr.14) to the accompaniment of a traditional tune.
 
It may not be too difficult to record a single voice and accompaniment, though it isn’t always easy to get the right balance between the two, especially when three instruments are used, but the recording balance here is good.
 
The booklet contains the texts but there are no translations, which is a serious problem when so many languages are involved: not just medieval Spanish but Catalan, Gallego and French. Some of the texts are difficult even for Spanish speakers: the morillas de Jaén (tr.16) are translated by the more usual word morenas in some versions, the three Moorish girls from Jaén who love the singer.
 
The multilingual notes are informative but brief, with less than a page on the music in each language. What we have is very useful, but we needed much more. The English translation is mostly idiomatic, apart from the use of ‘begun’ for ‘began’.
 
The title of the collection is an odd mixture of Spanish and Latin: Cantos de la España antigua would have been more logical than ...antiqua. The photograph of the Alhambra on the front cover is appropriate: a Moorish artefact which, like ladino music, survived the reconquista – to this day, in fact.
 
Small grumbles apart, mostly concerning the lack of documentation, I enjoyed this recording. If you already know this repertoire, I’m sure that you will, too. If you have yet to become familiar with it, you may find Shirley Rumsey on Naxos a better introduction.
 
Brian Wilson
 
 


Advertising on
Musicweb


Donate and keep us afloat

 

New Releases

Naxos Classical
All Naxos reviews

Hyperion recordings
All Hyperion reviews

Foghorn recordings
All Foghorn reviews

Troubadisc recordings
All Troubadisc reviews



all Bridge reviews


all cpo reviews

Divine Art recordings
Click to see New Releases
Get 10% off using code musicweb10
All Divine Art reviews


All Eloquence reviews

Lyrita recordings
All Lyrita Reviews

 

Wyastone New Releases
Obtain 10% discount

Subscribe to our free weekly review listing

 

 


EXPLORE MUSICWEB INTERNATIONAL

Making a Donation to MusicWeb

Writing CD reviews for MWI

About MWI
Who we are, where we have come from and how we do it.

Site Map

How to find a review

How to find articles on MusicWeb
Listed in date order

Review Indexes
   By Label
      Select a label and all reviews are listed in Catalogue order
   By Masterwork
            Links from composer names (eg Sibelius) are to resource pages with links to the review indexes for the individual works as well as other resources.

Themed Review pages

Jazz reviews

 

Discographies
   Composer
      Composer surveys
   National
      Unique to MusicWeb -
a comprehensive listing of all LP and CD recordings of given works
.
Prepared by Michael Herman

The Collector’s Guide to Gramophone Company Record Labels 1898 - 1925
Howard Friedman

Book Reviews

Complete Books
We have a number of out of print complete books on-line

Interviews
With Composers, Conductors, Singers, Instumentalists and others
Includes those on the Seen and Heard site

Nostalgia

Nostalgia CD reviews

Records Of The Year
Each reviewer is given the opportunity to select the best of the releases

Monthly Best Buys
Recordings of the Month and Bargains of the Month

Comment
Arthur Butterworth Writes

An occasional column

Phil Scowcroft's Garlands
British Light Music articles

Classical blogs
A listing of Classical Music Blogs external to MusicWeb International

Reviewers Logs
What they have been listening to for pleasure

Announcements

 

Community
Bulletin Board

Give your opinions or seek answers

Reviewers
Past and present

Helpers invited!

Resources
How Did I Miss That?

Currently suspended but there are a lot there with sound clips


Composer Resources

British Composers

British Light Music Composers

Other composers

Film Music (Archive)
Film Music on the Web (Closed in December 2006)

Programme Notes
For concert organizers

External sites
British Music Society
The BBC Proms
Orchestra Sites
Recording Companies & Retailers
Online Music
Agents & Marketing
Publishers
Other links
Newsgroups
Web News sites etc

PotPourri
A pot-pourri of articles

MW Listening Room
MW Office

Advice to Windows Vista users  
Questionnaire    
Site History  
What they say about us
What we say about us!
Where to get help on the Internet
CD orders By Special Request
Graphics archive
Currency Converter
Dictionary
Magazines
Newsfeed  
Web Ring
Translation Service

Rules for potential reviewers :-)
Do Not Go Here!
April Fools




Return to Review Index

Untitled Document


Reviews from previous months
Join the mailing list and receive a hyperlinked weekly update on the discs reviewed. details
We welcome feedback on our reviews. Please use the Bulletin Board
Please paste in the first line of your comments the URL of the review to which you refer.