Various forward-looking early music ensembles have offered releases drawn on the fascinating repertory of the Mexican Baroque, but with this disc by the very popular all-male San Francisco group
Chanticleer, the music has reached a new level. It sounds like an odd idea at first, but the group gave its first concert 30 years ago at Mission San Dolores on San Francisco's south side, and it treats the project as a homecoming of sorts. (It has also recorded Mexican Baroque choral music in the past, well in advance of the current wave.) The music was rolled out during a tour of various California missions, documented on an accompanying DVD, and the music CD itself was recorded live at the tour's final stop at Mission San Dolores. Not all the music is specifically Californian (Manuel de Sumaya, "America's Handel," was Mexican, of partly Native American descent), but the program does a good job of suggesting the mix of music that would have been present at New Spain's most far-flung outposts. The 11 selections recorded here include a Misa en sol, probably by California composer Juan Bautista Sancho; its sections, in the manner of many recent historically informed recordings of masses, are interspersed with motets and other works. Taken as a whole, the program reveals an intriguing range of layers of the sort that has led so many foreign observers to immerse themselves in Mexican culture. There is plainchant. There is a sort of metric chant called canto figurado (which did not indicate the presence of a figured bass). And there are polyphonic settings, ranging in style from Renaissance to, remarkably, Classical-era, which was completely up to date for the time (the missions date from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries). Hear the opening ¡O qué soave!, which was anonymous but widely copied around California. It could almost be a minor piece of early Mozart, fresh and bright, except for the rather percussive treatment of the basic accompanimental group, which pointed toward a Native American influence. That influence is suggested here, rather than explored in detail, by the use of a harp and guitar. Another interesting aspect of this language is the use of different styles in alternatim or alternating-structure pieces, which may set one verse in chant and the next in fully orchestrated Classical phrase structures. The tone
Chanticleer strikes for all this is very nice: the group keeps things simple and restrained, but lets the male sopranos and altos stretch out just a bit with slightly sensuous vibrato. The end result is one of
Chanticleer's most interesting albums for years, and a worthwhile addition to collections of New World Spanish music that have begun with the wilder discs of
Jordi Savall and
Andrew Lawrence-King.