Arda el aire (The Air Is Burning) offers a collection of seven multi-movement pieces, all originating in the same milieu: composed in the early eighteenth century, they are dedicated to the Virgin of the Ribbon (in Catalan, La Verge de la Cinta), who was said to have appeared to a priest distraught over not having finished his Matins prayers and given him a handmade ribbon to use as a belt. Booklet commentaries appear in Catalan, Spanish, and English, but the work texts, which are in Spanish, are not translated at all. This is disappointing -- if translations into Catalan were purportedly required for the album's local audience, then why weren't the work texts also translated? This aside, the almost unknown music is intriguing. The pieces, as conductor and annotator Marian Rosa Montagut noted, are not villancicos in the sense of the old sacred-madrigal-like pieces of Renaissance Spain, but are more like cantatas, with recitatives and wholly Italianate arias. They retain specifically Spanish characteristics, however; the texts are divided into verses (known as coplas), and, most important, most of the pieces begin with a choral introduction in an older style, with antiphonal effects and shifts between duple and triple meters. This has a pleasing effect, creating a built-in contrast between choral and solo-vocal sections that evokes but does not resemble the contrast between a chorale's sobriety and an Italian aria's passion in a Bach cantata. The performances by the
Harmonia del Parnàs are pleasant but in no way splendid. Here's hoping that this unique repertory has hereby been opened up to more internationally ambitious performers.