It is with The Rite of Spring. It is with Parsifal. And so it is with Victoria’s Officium defunctorum: I remember the exact circumstances under which I first heard each piece, and the near-physiological effect each had on me. In the case of the latter, it was New Year’s Eve 1995; I was in a metallic burgundy Peugeot 306 travelling east on the A379 between Ermington and Kingsbridge in South Devon. It was approaching 6pm. 

If you can get past the navel-gazing irrelevance of that little anecdote, it actually speaks volumes about the music. ‘Hair-raising’, says Edward Breen of Victoria’s Tenebrae Responses in an early recording from Westminster Cathedral Choir, and you’d better believe it: Iberian music from the Renaissance is strange, intoxicating, invigorating and immediately alluring. And there’s rather more to it than that which flowed from Victoria’s pen.

A decade after that vehicular brush with Victoria, sat on a British Midland Embraer ERJ somewhere over the English Channel, I first heard the Lamentations of Jeremiah by Alonso Lobo in a recording from John Eliot Gardner’s Monteverdi Choir (now just re-released on SDG - Amazon). It felt, once again, like the doors to a new world were being opened.

Lobo was born in Seville eight years after Victoria. His Lamentations take that composer’s limited use of complex polyphony and clear, bold presentation of words (to paraphrase Edward Breen) to a different place: short musical paragraphs of cumulative intensity – each draped with long, arching phrases and pronounced cadences – lead to one monumental hanging cadence; after a pregnant silence, the music collapses into the ecstatic radiance of a major key. Back then on the plane, it seemed to me as miraculous as flight itself. 

Similarly structured but more straightforwardly expressive is the eight-voice Missa pro defunctis (1621) by Duarte Lôbo – Portuguese and no apparent relation to Alonso (though I first ordered the disc not realising it was a different Lobo at all). This gutsy, uncompromising music paints Lôbo as the Janáček to Victoria’s Dvořák: harmonies don’t obey the rules and intensity is often realised through repetition and thrust. The booklet in Hyperion’s thrilling recording (Amazon) observes the music’s ‘conservative’ nature. Maybe in terms of structure and range it is, but in terms of aesthetic? No way.

The Lobos are gaining currency these days – catching up with their contemporaries Guerrero, Morales, Cardoso and the like. But Pedro Rimonte was new to me – and to the recording catalogue – when La Hispanoflamenca released the first recording of his Missa pro defunctis last year on Etcetera (Amazon).

Rimonte hailed from Zaragoza but spent time in the Netherlands; true, his Requiem does have a Flemish feel in the twisting intricacy of its polyphony. But the music is of a generally low tessitura and an intensity of expression that renders it just as striking as those pieces mentioned above, even if it tends only to glance at their declamatory paragraph-by-paragraph structure. And Victoria? The fingerprints of his influence – alongside those of Guerrero – are all over it.

I knew I’d be writing this blog on a Norwegian train, and in preparation ripped a few intriguing but unheard discs including one of 17th-century sacred music from Lisbon and Granada sung by the choir of The Queen’s College Oxford under Owen Rees (Amazon). As we climbed higher into the snow-covered mountains outside Oslo and paused over a huge frozen fjord at the station in Atna, Rees and his choristers arrived at a short set of Lamentations by Portuguese-turned-Andalucían composer Manuel Leitão de Aviles. In its combination of aspiring humility and devotional awe, it seemed in that moment the only rational counterpoint to the breathtaking splendour that lay before my eyes. Maybe it was just the view, but I’ve a feeling I’ll remember my first encounter with de Aviles for some time.