Following the revelatory release a couple of years ago of Morales en Toledo it is a great pleasure to welcome back Michael Noone and Ensemble Plus Ultra to Glossa for a further demonstration — in the music of Morales’ younger contemporary Francisco Guerrero — of Noone’s remarkable knack of uniting unknown music from recognized masters in superb performances underpinned by exemplary scholarship. Through his ongoing research in the Cathedral Archives in Toledo, Noone has discovered a group of six hymns by Guerrero (written when he was apprenticed to Morales), recording these in the church of San Miguel in Cuenca along with the previously-unrecorded Missa Super flumina Babylonis in the company of plainchant specialist Juan Carlos Asensio’s Schola Antiqua and the instrumentalists from His Majesties Sagbutts and Cornetts.
The path of Noone, whose initial introduction to Spanish Renaissance polyphony came whilst organist at St Mary’s Cathedral in his native Sydney, has taken him to Toledo, King’s College, Cambridge, Hong Kong, and also Phoenix, Arizona in the USA, where a meeting with Richard Cheetham led to the formation of the Orchestra of the Renaissance from which forces emerged Glossa recordings of enterprising programmes of music by Guerrero, Morales and also Sebastián de Vivanco. Ensemble Plus Ultra was founded in 2001 by Noone and tenor Warren Trevelyan-Jones and they have recently provided further proof of their invigorating approach with a performance at the Música Antigua Aranjuez Festival in Spain of an ignored early version of a seldom-performed Mass by Victoria (the Missa De Beata María) along with more unknown Morales.
For the new Guerrero recording [Missa Super flumina Babylonis, Glossa GCD 922005] Noone has added the superlative eight voice antiphon Regina caeli and the motet Ave virgo sanctissima in performances which provide convincing proof of the highly-sophisticated nature of polyphony from the Spanish Renaissance. The conductor, along with fellow researcher Graeme Skinner, contributes an essay on the works recorded here.
As a musicologist working on the music of composers such as Victoria, Morales and Guerrero, what led you to want to perform and record music by these and lesser-known composers as well?
Victoria for me was a way into an incredibly rich and dense kind of context. What I want to do with all these pieces is to understand the way that this music was conceived and performed in the fullest way possible. Yet the fact is that we do not even have decent complete editions for Victoria, Guerrero and Morales. With other composers, we have nothing there at all. Take one composer in Bernardino de Ribera whose complete works exist in the Toledo Cathedral archive. De Ribera was maestro de capilla in Ávila when both Victoria and Sebastián de Vivanco were young choirboys there. It is quite possible that he was the most influential composer of all — his influence was stronger than anybody else’s on Victoria. Nobody — if they want to listen or perform his music — can do so. It simply hasn’t been transcribed. Composers such as Ribera interest me not only because they illuminate for us the three peaks — of Victoria, Guerrero and Morales — but because to take the three peaks out of their context doesn’t do justice to our appreciation of them, and it also deprives us of the much richer repertory that at least deserves to be heard once and a lot of which, I think, deserves to be heard a lot more than once. I suppose it was my frustration at being a scholar who was digging around in this very solitary world with these incredible riches whilst wanting desperately to share them with others that led me into the whole performing world. I am now realizing, through CDs and concerts, that this music has an extraordinary power to reach ordinary people at quite a deep level, a kind of audience that is simply not open to the scholarly world.
How important for you is this question of context, of how to perform this 16th century music to a modern audience?
Very. How do we communicate this to a 21st century audience? This is something that I continue to struggle with. When we are doing performances in places like the choir of Toledo Cathedral for instance, most of the work is done for you, most of the reason the music is the way it is, is thrown in your face. Yet it is quite a different thing when you take a programme to somewhere like London’s South Bank in London. So, this leads me to ask questions such as how do we recontextualize this music for modern concert audiences and what are we actually doing when we are making a recording of the music. I think that we need to work a lot more and we need to realize that this music was never concert music, that the vast majority of Roman Catholic priests have no idea of liturgical Latin, that the whole idea of the liturgy itself is at best curiosity value, even for Roman Catholics. So, what do we do? I think in a post-modern world there are a lot of alternatives open to us and the ones that I particularly want to explore now are working with images, dances, movement and mime and stage sets. Last year Ensemble Plus Ultra carried out a tour of cathedrals in Andalucía — we sang at Guerrero’s own cathedral in Sevilla, just near his tomb; as well as Cádiz, Málaga, Granada and Córdoba. There is something to be said a lot about singing this music in its context. Those cathedrals really are theatrical. The music itself is also very theatrical and very functional and I find it very profound, very direct and very moving. One of the things that is absolutely clear when you are in those Spanish cathedrals is that there are multiple meanings, there are many layers. The Guerrero Mass on the new CD, the Missa Super flumina Babylonis, has never been recorded before. When one looks at the standard reference works about the Guerrero Mass on the new CD, the Missa Super flumina Babylonis, such books do not even know the source of the Mass — from where it got its name, from where the melodic material came. It was Juan Carlos Asensio of Schola Antiqua, with his amazing knowledge of the Gregorian repertory, who provided the answer to this riddle. When you start to appreciate the fact that Guerrero has built this wonderful five voice multi-layered masterpiece out of a small chunk of Gregorian chant fragment and poured into that all of the layers of meaning of the psalm itself from which it comes, you realize what a sophisticated art form we are dealing with.
What do you believe is the importance of the Guerrero hymns from the Toledo Codex 25?
You should know that the manuscript that these discoveries came from had been allowed to stand in water and most of the pages were fused together. It was extremely difficult — and in some cases impossible — to open them up fully. There were three years of very painstaking work. Intriguingly, there were six completely unknown works by Francisco Guerrero there, written when he was 17 or 18. We knew that Guerrero had studied with Morales — Guerrero had mentioned it a number of times — but what we didn’t know was what form that apprenticeship took and where it took place. We can now date it and we can see side by side Guerrero and Morales writing pieces based on the same cantus firmus. You can see the younger Guerrero being given compositional exercises by the éminence gris, perhaps the most famous Spanish composer of all time in the 16th century and who had recently returned to Spain. This to me is fascinating because it tells us a lot. It is a frozen moment in Spanish musical history; it shows the changing of the guard and the younger composer learning his craft. One of the interesting things about these Guerrero pieces is that later in his life he published revised versions and in some cases we have three revisions. Through these discoveries you can see and feel the development of his musical style.
What kind of sound are you trying to produce with Ensemble Plus Ultra — in concert or on record? What size and configuration of choir do you prefer to use?
I am looking for something that projects the music that isn’t the typical English sound (beautiful as it is, it is quite clear that that wasn’t what was around in the 16th century). I am interested in constantly pushing the singers, for instance by introducing sixteenth century Spanish pronunciation (there is no final authority here, especially when you have an Australian telling Brits in Spain how to pronounce the words!). You really do manage to get the singers working with the actual sounds that they are making, because although the words are familiar, the pronunciation makes them unfamiliar and it moves the line forward horizontally. With my work in archives I can tell you at any given time how many singers — and often how many instrumentalists — were on the payroll, but not how many performed a piece at any particular time. I am not trying to reproduce the past, but I am convinced that the more we know about the past the better our decisions are going to be. You may notice in the new Guerrero recording that I have gone right back to what I was doing with the Orchestra of the Renaissance. This time it is His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts who are providing instrumental variety (as well as doubling of the voices at times and substituting the voices with instruments) coupled with the use of Spanish plainsong group. So we had three groups – exactly what they had in 16th century Spanish cathedrals.
by Mark Wiggins © 2007 Glossa Music / MusiContact