Amidst all the celebrations of Christopher Columbus's momentous voyage of 1492, spare a thought for the poor record producer trying to make some mileage out of the quincentenary. To be frank, the events of 1492 (and their consequences) had singularly little impact on music. Even music-making in the New World becomes a subject of any real interest only in the seventeenth century. At best, then, 1992 seems set to consolidate what the 1980s have already demonstrated: that Spanish music of the Renaissance has lived too long under the shadow of better-known repertories (Italian and English especially), and demands a fairer hearing.
No other recording in the catalogue gives a more comprehensive overview of Spanish (and New World) Golden Age polyphony than does this one by the Hilliard Ensemble, and for that reason alone it deserves a warm welcome. Some of the contents will be familiar to aficionados, but most will not. Here for once is an anthology that happily admits the small along with the great, the rough together with the smooth. No one will claim Alonso de Mondejar's Ave rex noster or the pair of Aztec hymns by Hernando Franco (evidently the pen-name of a native Mexican musician) to be treasures in the gallery of musical achievement. But their very gaucheness lends them a charm that truly wins the heart. Alongside are works that have already been hailed as masterpieces: Morales's sturdy Pater noster/Ave Maria, for example, and the exquisite Ave Virgo sanctissima by Francisco Guerrero. Other pieces, especially from the early sixteenth century, have long deserved proper recognition, and here receive precisely that. Especially welcome is the advocacy of Francisco de Penalosa and Pedro de Escobar, both of them important Spanish composers of the generation of Josquin. Never before have they been so sensitively represented on record.
My only disappointment is that many of the performances are less than fully fashioned. True, everything is in its place: no one will fault the ensemble, the blend of voices or the fine tuning, and the words are there too—even if the Hilliard Ensemble generally gives the music pride of place over the texts. What is often missing, however, is a sense of direction. Among the motets, some tracks have the quality of excellent sight-reading: absolutely secure, but crying out for somebody to convert them into intelligent, communicative performances. By and large the secular pieces with livelier texts fare better in this respect, but compare even these performances with equivalent ones by (for example) the King's Singers and you will realize just how much further the Hilliard Ensemble might have gone. Some missed opportunities, then; but not to the extent that they seriously diminish this useful anthology's overall desirability.'