The "música del Delphin" in the title of this disc refers to the 1538 publication Los seis libros del Delphin de música de cifra para tañer vihuela (Six books for the Dauphin, consisting of notated music for playing the vihuela), one of the primary collections of vihuela music from the sixteenth century. The vihuela was the Spanish predecessor to the guitar, with 12 strings in six pairs. The leap to a Baroque guitar is not a large one; that to the modern guitar played here by Argentina's
Pablo Márquez is more significant, but
Márquez appears to have taken to heart the maxim that if one is playing harpsichord music on the piano the last thing you should do is try to make the piano sound like a harpsichord -- he doesn't try to make his guitar sound like a vihuela. Instead he emphasizes the smoothness of the modern guitar, crafting the music's complex, quasi-improvised ornaments into effortless runs. The music in the Narváez collection consists of variations (diferencias), fantasias (some denoted by their themes, like the Sesto tono sobre fa ut mi re), and settings of chansons, the most famous being Josquin's Mille regretz -- a favorite of Charles V, it became the Canción del Emperador. The variations are among the earliest examples of the form committed to paper, and in general the key to successfully performing this kind of music is to grasp its roots in non-notated instrumental improvisation.
Márquez has a captivating serene calm in the Josquin adaptation, and he has a commanding way of putting across the performative aspect of Narváez's music; in Je veulx laysser melancolie de Richafort (track 12), where the characteristic long-short-short chanson rhythm almost immediately becomes embroiled in technical complexity, he gives a sense of the pure display the music must have had in its original setting, even if he is not using an original instrument. The recording is beautiful and luminous; ECM's engineers seem to be among the few able to make a guitar sound natural, neither getting too close to its extramusical noises nor whitewashing the intensity of the performance moment to which they speak. Students of the Spanish Renaissance will want to seek out one of the vihuela recordings of this music, but for the general listener it makes a beautiful, meditative solo guitar disc.