Pere (or "Pedro") Rabassa is a Catalonian composer whose years -- 1683 to 1767 -- are nearly the same as those of Georg Philipp Telemann, and in his time, the standing of Rabassa in Spain was comparable to that of Telemann in Greater Europe. Some of Rabassa's music managed to travel to Europe and even to Spanish missions in the Americas. That it did not travel forward into the future as part of the mainstream Western repertoire is partly because Spanish Baroque literature as a whole, excepting that by foreigner Domenico Scarlatti, had no chance to compete for recognition alongside such titans as Telemann, Handel, and Johann Sebastian Bach. As it is said, "history is written by the winners," and in the eighteenth century, the "winners" were English. Charles Burney, in all his wisdom and well-considered outreach among musicians, never came close to experiencing the music of Rabassa. If he had, he certainly would've been blown away by the sheer artistry, beauty, and variety of the astounding Missa Defunctorum heard on La ma de Guido's Pere Rabassa: Requiem. Rabassa's Requiem has the same sense of solidity that one experiences in a Telemann cantata and demonstrates a similar tendency toward text painting, but also has the qualities of voluptuous lushness, harmonic flexibility, and snappy rhythms that we associate with Spanish music.
Rabassa's Requiem was written around 1713 for the cathedral at Valencia and survives in a manuscript found in its library; it is scored for soloists, double chorus, strings, and continuo with two recorder parts. It is played and sung here by
Harmonia del Parnàs, who demonstrated nowhere near this proficiency on its previous La Ma de Guido outing devoted to villancicos; perhaps leader Marian Rosa Montagut has found a whip to crack, as this performance is generally taut, disciplined, and sensitive to the dynamic ebb and flow of Rabassa's music. There are occasional lapses of pitch among singers here and there, but mainly in passages that are tortuously chromatic or complex; just listen to the constantly changing harmonic profile of the Domine in the mass -- any good singer might wonder, "how can you find your pitch in the middle of THAT?" Some of the individual movements, such as the Graduale and Libera me, are impressively long and contain a wealth of ideas on their own, and at times you can hear Rabassa reaching into textures more readily associated with the Renaissance than with the Baroque. The only considerable setback in this recording is the Lamentation setting; nothing is wrong with the music, which is even more chromatic in spots than in the Requiem, but the recording picks up the solo soprano in an excessively bright and rather harsh ambience. Nevertheless, Rabassa, whose work has only been known since the 1990s, is a major discovery; if La ma de Guido's Pere Rabassa: Requiem is what we can expect from this composer, please, let's have more of this.