CD REVIEW: MUSICA SONORA/DIA DE LOS MUERTOS
posted by James Reel
The Day of the Dead is upon us, a fine time to call to your attention a CD by the local early-music vocal ensemble Musica Sonora. The group has available a CD recorded during a 2006 concert featuring Tomás Luis de Victoria’s Officium Defunctorum, or Requiem Mass, and it’s a perfect tie-in with Day of the Dead activities in the Spanish-speaking New World.
For a bit of background, let’s turn to the program notes distributed at the concert:
Día de los Muertos [is] a tradition celebrated particularly in Mexico and parts of Central America and the United States, in which the souls of the dead visit the living for a short time to eat favorite foods and commune with the living. In pre-Columbian times, the festivities were held for a month, but after the advent of the Spanish in the New World, the tradition was blended with elements of Catholicism and restricted to two days. Dead children return to their families on Nov. 1 (All Saints’ Day) and deceased adults visit on Nov. 2 (All Souls’ Day). Family graves are cleaned and altars prepared, decorated with marigolds, copal incense, candles photographs of the deceased, and special food. Children (living but perhaps dead, as well) eat sweets in the shape of skulls and _pan de muerto_ is found in local bakeries. To honor the dead and their living loved ones, we offer a performance of this Requiem Mass. In the Catholic tradition, the Office of the Dead is said on All Souls’ Day for the benefit of souls in purgatory and at other times for a particular dead person, and dates from the eighth or ninth centuries, actually predating the Requiem Mass itself. It includes psalms, passages from scripture and other elements, divided into Vespers, Mass, Matins and Lauds. The Mass for the Dead, also called the Requiem Mass after the first words of the introit (“Requiem aeternam”), dates from the 14th century. Unlike the usual sort of Mass of the Catholic liturgy, in which the lectionary changes with the church calendar, the Requiem Mass is fixed, with texts specific to the form. More joyful Mass elements, such as the Gloria and Credo, are omitted. With Victoria’s Officium Defunctorum as a centerpiece, our program extends back in time to include works from Requiem Masses by Cristobal de Morales and forward to instrumental composers of the 17th century.
One of those other composers is Francisco de Peraza (1564-1598, making him about a generation younger than Victoria and two generations the junior of Morales). This program includes two short organ tientos of Morales, played by Jeffri Sanders; the music sounds a bit exotic, suggesting at least a faint Middle Eastern influence (don’t forget the centuries-long Moorish domination of Spain, which had ended less than a century before this music was written). As for the Victoria Mass, it includes a great deal of lovely, smoothly flowing polyphony, as well as some segments of plainchant—including the famous Dies Irae, the “Day of Wrath” motif that would later find its way into several Romantic-era works, including nearly every major composition of Rachmaninov.
The Musica Sonora performances under the direction of Christina Jarvis are quite fine; I only wish that the group had been able to include program notes, rather than just track listings, in its four-page CD booklet. I assume the disc is available only at Musica Sonora concerts and through its members and director; you’ll find contact information at the group’s Web site.
