Discography
El clave del Emperador: Diego de Pantoja and his legacy
IBS Classical (2021)
Íliber Ensemble & Todos los Tonos y Ayres
Sponsored by Ayuntamiento de Valdemoro, Centro Cultural de China en Madrid, Instituto Confucio de Granada, Instituto Confucio de Madrid, Instituto Cervantes de Pekín and Biblioteca Miguel de Cervantes de Shanghái
With the collaboration of Festival de Música Antigua de Úbeda y Baeza (FeMAUB), Festival de Música Antigua Andrés de Vandelvira (FeMAAV), Instituto Confucio de Zaragoza, Fundación Archivo Manuel de Falla
The selection of works included in this recording provides a small sample of the extraordinary cultural diversity that existed at the Chinese Court over almost two centuries as a result of the stimulus of Diego de Pantoja and his introduction of European music into the Forbidden City. Divided into four large sections that portray and recreate different moments of this unique historical episode, the pieces are linked without interruption, respecting the programmatic form conceived for the concerts: the journey begins with the music of Pantoja’s time, uncovering his musical legacy through the accounts that have come down to us thanks to the missionaries who lived at the Court until the end of the eighteenth century. This program is a tribute to the Spanish Jesuit Diego de Pantoja (1571-1618) on the 450th anniversary of his birth. Pantoja was the first European who, together with the Italian Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), entered the service of the Chinese Court at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This marked the beginning of a unique episode in history in terms of the length and breadth of cultural, scientific and artistic relations between two very different worlds.
Sebastián Durón (1660-1716)
La guerra de los gigantes
IBS Classical (2019)
Marta Infante | Palante
Eva Juárez | Júpiter
Aurora Peña | Minerva
Solomy Antonyak | Hércules
Pilar Alva | La Fama
Soledad Cardoso | El Tiempo
Laura Sabatel | La Inmortalidad
Olalla Alemán | El Silencio
Luis David Barrios | Tenor
Granada Baroque Orchestra & Íliber Ensemble
Darío Tamayo | Artistic direction
Paco Moya | Music producer & tonmeister
Darío Moreno | Harpsichord & conductor
Transcription and critical edition of the work | Raúl Angulo & Antoni Pons - Asociación Ars Hispana
With the kind support of Community of Madrid
Sebastián Durón is usually recognized as one of the leading Spanish composers of theater music, although this repertoire is barely performed nowadays, even in concert version. As far as we know, ten complete scores of Durón’s stage works have been preserved, four of which are entirely sung, a number that is higher than that found in theater music by other important Spanish musicians of the 17th and 18th centuries, such as Juan Hidalgo, Juan de Navas or Antonio Literes. The fact that, in his theater music, Durón uses both the conventions of 17th-century Spanish court theater and some elements of the dramma per musica has placed these pieces in a diffuse and poorly understood territory, unlike what happens with the works of Hidalgo and Literes, repertoire which has been studied better. For some scholars, the theater music of Durón is incoherent due to the introduction of elements that are unfamiliar to the Spanish court theater, in contrast to the great dramaturgy devised by Calderón de la Barca and Hidalgo. On the contrary, for other scholars, the music of Durón is remarkable for its openness to modernity, although it is a timid modernization against the determined Italianization that is observed in Literes and other later musicians. In our opinion, however, Durón’s theater work exhibits great originality and drama in itself, which is hardly understandable if we approach it with the abstract models that face tradition to modernity, or Spanish to Italian.