London Festival of Baroque Music - Raquel Andueza & La Galania

‘I am madness, the one that alone infuses pleasure and sweetness and contentment to the world’

Performed in the round, Raquel Andueza & La Galania present a program not only of secular Spanish music, but also a sample of scores that contain songs with text in Spanish, found in European collections. This means two things: that the poems in Spanish were inspiring for musicians from other countries to put their melodies with those texts, and also that the Spanish influence (political power, displaced persons, etc.) was so strong at the time that perhaps those melodies were so well known in their time that they deserved to be copied in French, Italian or English collections. Likewise, we bring to light several reconstructions of typical Spanish dances with melodies that were lost: folías, zarabandas and jácaras. Just as in the case of the texts of many seguidillas and zarabandas we assume that the music was destroyed due to its explicit content (the zarabanda was prohibited by the Royal Council in 1583), in that of the jácara we believe that it was lost, without a censoring hand, probably because all this music was mainly interpreted by oral tradition, without the need to have a score to be able to interpret it. Spanish vocal music from this period is characterized mainly by the rhythmic treatment of the text, full of variety and characterized by the use of hemiolas. Music where passion, jealousy, love, sweetness, restlessness, expectation, sadness, reproach and even death for love intertwine and merge in a perfect baroque chiaroscuro