Monteverdi Choir | Santiago A Cappella | CD

Description: Monteverdi Choir | Santiago A Cappella | CD | Gardiner USED CD in VERY GOOD Condition The medieval concept and practice of pilgrimages stretching over months or even years – to Jerusalem, Rome or Santiago de Compostela – sits uneasily with today’s package tours and motorised travel. For the original pilgrims, though the destination (both physical and metaphysical) was important, the journey was the thing, with all its hardships, the hazards along the way and the shared experience, occasionally violent but mostly convivial. Today there are less onerous, probably safer and certainly faster ways to visit the magnificent abbeys, priories and cathedrals that criss-cross southern France and punctuate the various routes through northern Spain. Yet something is missed if we are accorded only the briefest of glances before the tour guide summons us to the next step in the itinerary. Medieval men and women had the time to become absorbed, the capacity to be enraptured. Perhaps they were more content to live in the present, without one eye constantly on the clock or hourglass. Our own experience of these once vibrant buildings becomes generally less vivid the more the heritage industry takes them over – until, that is, they are once again filled with music. Music, from its Gregorian roots to the great flowering of a cappella polyphony in the fifteenth, sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, has the power to re-ignite these churches, to recharge batteries flattened by over-use and the seeping away of cumulative prayer. For some it may offer a substitute for lost piety and the intense faith of earlier pilgrims. For others it can provide a feast for the ear as well as the eye, and spiritual refreshment of a kind that is rare in a world of fakes and facsimiles. Many of the projects that the Monteverdi Choir has undertaken over the years have started out by matching music with historic archi - tecture – the singing of Monteverdi’s Vespers in Cremona, Mantua and Venice, Bach cantatas all over Saxony and beyond, Bruckner motets in St Florian. In 2004, the choir’s fortieth anniversary year, we under - took a pilgrimage in song along the oldest and most famous of the pilgrimage routes, el camino de Santiago. Our journey started at midsummer, high up on the wild Aubrac plateau in southwest France, before descending to the matchless beauty of Conques, the fortified Introduction John Eliot Gardiner 1 cathedral of Rodez and the Cistercian abbey of Loc-Dieu. We then continued across the Pyrenees and along the ‘French route’ through Aragon, Navarra, Rioja and Castilla y León to Galicia and Compostela itself. This recording, made before we left London, anticipates some of the glorious polyphony we were to sing in the French and Spanish churches along the way. A second recording, Pilgrimage to Santiago, was made after our return and reproduces the sequence of processional entries, pilgrim chants and antiphons which preceded and interspersed these and other great polyphonic works in our concerts. As individuals we all had different reasons for undertaking this journey – in body, mind and spirit. But there was a common quest in the music, with all the technical tests and interpretative challenges it posed, as well as the intoxicating beauty it provides. As the pilgrim patois goes, ‘E ultreya e suseya, Deus adjuva nos!’.

Price: 12 GBP

Location: Richmond

End Time: 2025-01-15T22:12:48.000Z

Shipping Cost: 8.68 GBP