More praise from Granada

Reviews

More praise from Granada

Mercedes García Molina, Ritmo.es (5 July, 2026)

There is a tendency today to turn historically informed performance into a display of method itself. The performance ends up shifting the focus from the music to the procedure: reading from the score, reconstructing vocal practices, or hypothetical ornamentation. Stile Antico chooses precisely the opposite path. Nothing in its singing invites reflection on the process. Everything leads directly to the music. Emotion seems to be understood as something already contained within the score.

…The programme proved exemplary both for its historical coherence and its musical approach. It did not merely illustrate a historical episode, but rather constructed a journey of extraordinary quality, alternating works by Josquin, Pierre de la Rue , Nicolas Gombert, Cristóbal de Morales , Rodrigo de Ceballos, Thomas Créquillon, and Jacobus Clemens non Papa, whose beauty rendered any further justification unnecessary. This same musical rigor was also applied to the performance choices.

The full ensemble rarely appeared continuously. Changes in personnel always responded to the logic of each work and gave the performance a constant variety of textures. The combinations changed according to the demands of each piece: four female voices sufficed for Virgo Sancta Katherina , the attributed Absalon fili mi was reduced to six singers—a stripping away that multiplied its intensity—and other pieces recovered the fullness of twelve voices. The singers’ arrangement reinforced this idea. Far from being grouped by voice part, each polyphonic line was distributed throughout the space, allowing those who shared a voice to look at each other continuously. This was not a mere stage detail, but the visible expression of a way of understanding polyphony as true chamber music. Communication between them was constant and resulted in a shared phrasing that arose from the writing itself.

The first works alone were enough to confirm this. In the Salve Regina , Stile Antico allowed the exceptional clarity of Josquin’s writing to shine through without interference: each phrase begins, reaches its point of tension, and concludes precisely where it should. In the Magnificat Primi Toni , this same clarity renders Gombert’s dense imitative texture fully intelligible , while Rodrigo de Ceballos’s Hortus conclusus finds a natural place within the program, both for the beauty of the work itself and for the composer’s connection to the Granada of Charles V. From the opening Carole magnus eras , with its daring dissonances, to the jubilant final Jubilate Deo , the program maintained a clear musical unity throughout. The climax arrived with the attributed Absalon fili mi . Over the words of King David—”Absalom, my son! Oh, that I might die in your place!”—the music advances inexorably toward the abyss. In sed descendam in infernum plorans , a succession of descending fifths transfers that descent from the words to the harmony itself.