Siglo De Oro

LIONHEART
Lawrence Lipnik, Countertenor John Olund, Michael Ryan-Wenger, Tenors Jeffrey Johnson, Richard Porterfield, Baritones Kurt-Owen Richards, Bass

El Siglo de Oro:
A century of vocal music by Morales and Guerrero
This program will be performed without intermission

Ave maris stella Ojos claros, serenos Sanctíssima María Introit: Rorate caeli desuper Kyrie: Missa Ave Maria Gloria:Missa Ave Maria Sancta et immaculate Offertory: Ave Maria Sanctus: Missa Ave Maria Agnus Dei: Missa Ave Maria Communion: Ecce virgo concipiet Pan divino, gracioso Pastor, quien madre virgen ¿Qué te dare, Señor O Virgen, quand’os miro Vana sperança Antiphon: Ave Maria Missus est Gabriel

Gregorian Chant Francisco Guerrero (1528-1599) Guerrero Gregorian chant Cristobal Morales (c.1500-1553) MoralesGuerrero Gregorian chant Morales Morales Gregorian chant Guerrero Guerrero Guerrero Guerrero Guerrero Gregorian chant Morales

LIONHEART records for Koch International and is represented exclusively by Bernstein Artists, Inc.

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hile we are listening to the towering fugal edifices of J.S. Bach, we seldom pause to consider that this most revered composer of the High Baroque thought ofhimself simply as an exponent of the great polyphonic tradition of the Renaissance. Bach, after all, was not himself aware that his was a different Period in Music History. Balance among many voices, lacelike interweaving of motifs in imitation, use and reuse of familiar themes from plainchant or folksong, and wordpainting, all were musical techniques pioneered by Josquin des Prez and hisfifteenth-century contemporaries. Over the next 200 years, Italians Cipriano de Rore, Claudio Monteverdi and Arcangelo Corelli, Netherlanders Adrian Willaert and Jan Peterszoon Sweelinck, French composers Clemens non Papa and Marc-Antoine Charpentier, all continued to make use of these same techniques while greatly expanding the vocabulary of harmony and orchestration. Not least among the great followers ofJosquin and antecedents of Bach were the Spaniards: Victoria, Morales, and Guerrero. If there was an ideal place for a Great Composer of the Renaissance to be born in the sixteenth century, it would have to have been Seville. Renowned throughout the Middle Ages as a center of learning and the home of seventhcentury bishop Isidore of Seville (or Isidorus Hyspalensis—Hyspalis being the Latin name ofthe city), upon whose Etymologies and other writings most medieval higher education had been based, Seville boasted an enormous Cathedral, a converted mosque as rich in intellectual and financial resources as it was in arabesque ornament. The first printed books of music were produced there; piles of Inca and Mexican gold were stored in a tower on the very Cathedral grounds. For a gifted child tobe part of the choir there, and educated at the chapter school, was practically a guarantee of lifelong success. Cristóbal de Morales (c.1500-1553), though the better part of his career was to be spent abroad in Rome, was particularly proud of his home town and heritage. More than a musician, he was an academic who assiduously practiced writing in Latin, as he claimed, to prevent any of his rivalsin music from accusing him of lack of cultivation. His first appointments as an adult

were well-paid, as maestro de capilla in Ávila and then in Plasencia, but these appear to have been less than satisfactory, for there is no record—even though all Cathedral records were carefully kept and archived—of Morales’s whereabouts, for the four years before 1535. That year he appeared on the rolls ofthe papal choir in Rome, singing baritone. Pope Paul III was especially generous to musicians, and Morales seems to have enjoyed special favor. Furthermore, the choir was made up mostly of Spaniards, with whom he was apparently comfortable enough to stay for a decade. Certainly the pay was good: one perquisite was a personal servant, and when traveling in the pope’s retinue, a horse. In addition,...