Abadia del Sacromonte
Granada 2010
Tomás Luis de Victoria (c. 1548-1611) is universally acknowledged as the finest of Spain’s Golden Age composers, indeed one of the greatest composers of all time. Ensemble Plus Ultra is proud to have been chosen by the Fundación Caja Madrid to record for DGG Archiv a monumental collection of Victoria’s works to celebrate the 400th anniversary of his death in 2011. In this same year—2011—Ensemble Plus Ultra celebrates its tenth birthday.
Our series of ten CDs brings together a total of 42 musicians from more than five countries in recordings of more than 90 works by the greatest of the Spanish polyphonists. With the support of a team that included three recording producers and engineers, we spent more than 60 days in 2008 and 2009 recording more than 12 hours of music in such acoustically superb environments as the colegial church in Lerma, the iglesia de San Pedro in Tordesillas, and St Judes-on-the-hill in London.
In this exciting venture, we are joined by the specialist instrumentalists of His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts (dir. Jeremy West), Spanish plainsong specialists Schola Antiqua (dir. Juan Carlos Asensio) and renowned organist Andrés Cea Galan who plays the historic organs of Tordesillas and Lerma. The series of recordings is a project of the Fundación Caja Madrid, and the CDs will appear on the DGG Archiv label. The entire project was directed by Michael Noone.
Though we are more accustomed to associating Victoria with his native Ávila or his adopted Rome, he is in fact the composer who can be most closely be associated with Madrid. During the more than a quarter of a century that he lived in the Spanish capital, he published almost one half of his entire compositional output. For this reason, we have recorded almost all of the works that Victoria published in his landmark publication of 1600, the Missae, Magnificat, motecta, psalmi et alia quam plurima published by the royal printer, Juan de Flandes. In addition, we have recorded many works—or previously unedited versions of works—by Victoria that are found only in manuscripts, that have been specially edited from those manuscripts for this project, and that have never before been recorded. Highlights in this category include the nine lamentations that are preserved in a Sistine Chapel manuscript and the 12 works (including three masses and six magnificats) from a manuscript choirbook at Toledo cathedral. Other previously unrecorded masterworks include Bovicelli’s extraordinary virtuosic arrangement of Victoria’s Vadam et circuibo and a large number of ‘alternatim’ works featuring verses for organ, plainsong and wind instruments.