Music is the key

Maria João Pires recorded this recital some years ago; it is thankfully back in the catalog now, finally available again after so many years, thanks to Apex. There are many aspects of the recording which show their age considering the general approach to Bach on the piano in the year 2013—the slower tempos in the fast movements, the thicker orchestral textures, the expressive use of rubato, the numerous hairpin phrasings, especially in the strings. Yet the performances hold up well simply because Pires and Corboz are so in tune with the characters of each of these individual works. The great D-Minor Concerto is splendidly performed. The tempos here are perfectly chosen (how many performances of this work sound like perpetual-motion studies?), the passagework is crystal clear, the sound of the individual notes rounded and bouncy, the dialogue between soloist and orchestra is palpable, and the intensity of the whole is felt from beginning to end. There is reverence for t...

This Sony-label debut release by Israeli pianist David Greilsammer has much in common with his earlier recording Fantasie Fantasme, released on the Naxos label. In fact, here Greilsammer might be said to have refined the ideas on the earlier album. Both combine contemporary and mainstream repertory, and apparently Greilsammer has an inclination toward pretentious graphic design. But here the focus is tightened. Greilsammer constructs a sequence of four Baroque three-movement "pieces," each consisting of three compositions. Of these sets of three, the outer two are Baroque works, while the center is a contemporary piece, commissioned in two cases by Greilsammer himself from contemporary Israeli composers. Greilsammer balances these works cleverly: the structure of the sets of three is not fast-slow-fast, but not simply random, either; the pieces instead are linked by motive and mood, with the modern work emerging as just a slight shift from what precedes it, and as a logic...

Claudio Abbado's concerts were life-changing events for anyone lucky enough to hear them. Towards the end of his life, above all with the concerts he gave with his Lucerne Festival Orchestra, which he founded in 2003 and with whom he gave the last concerts of his life – unforgettable, utterly shattering performances of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony and Bruckner's Ninth - Abbado had taken orchestral music into a new realm of possibility and experience. The Lucerne project was the zenith of a life in music that had as its essential credo a word that you don't always associate with conductors, those supposed tyrants of the podium: "listen". He used that word more than any other in the rehearsals I saw him lead with the orchestra, a hand-picked ensemble of some of the greatest chamber musicians, orchestral players, and soloists in the world, with the young musicians of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra at its core (another orchestra Abbado founded, in addition to...

Thanks to The Four Seasons , the solo violin concerto is the genre with which Vivaldi is associated above all others. And indeed, at nearly 250 works, this species of composition forms the largest single portion of his output, outnumbering his next favourite, the concerto for orchestra, by more than four to one. In historical terms, too, his development of the formal aspects of the solo concerto was his greatest legacy: his model of three movements in the sequence fast-slow-fast still wields influence today, and the so-called "ritornello" structural principle - in which returning orchestral statements of a strongly defined, harmonically stable main theme offer a framework for more free-ranging and lightly scored passages involving the soloist - informed every composer's approach to concerto-writing until well into the 19th century. Yet Vivaldi's concerto output is considerably more varied than that. Not only did he compose concertos for a wide range ...

This very delicate and beautiful songbook is presented mainly in Spanish, but also has adaptations in French and English. It is a fantastic celebration of these especially sensual poems by Neruda who had written them on the Chilean Isla Negra after years in exile. Born Ricardo Eliecer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in 1904, Pablo Neruda took his pen name after the Czech poet Jan Neruda. Neruda became known as a poet in his teens, and wrote in a variety of styles from surrealist to overtly political tones, as well as erotically-charged love poems. These poems are what Ute's Neruda Song Cycle is based on. Because of his politically charged activities and writings, when President González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, Neruda was forced into exile. In 1971 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Neruda also collaborated with Picasso on highly politically inspired works, and Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the great...

 Quickly becoming known as one of the most exciting conductors of his generation, Pablo Heras-Casado is set to make his album debut, El Maestro Farinelli, on the recently re-launched label, Archiv Produktion for Deutsche Grammophon. Available May 27, 2014, this new album marks Heras-Casado’s return to his core repertoire and musical heritage, performing instrumental and vocal music associated with Farinelli, the legendary 18th-century castrato singer who served as impresario and court musician to the kings of Spain. With El Maestro Farinelli , Archiv Produktion offered Heras-Casado the opportunity to choose what music to conduct from the Farinelli period, focusing on neglected operas where many orchestral scores had been destroyed in a palace fire in the 19-century and ultimately those that survived had to be transcribed by hand. This album features a rare world premiere of eight recordings with some arias sung by noted countertenor Bejun Mehta as well as includin...

  If you have any doubt that the fipple flute is an acceptable substitute for the specified transverse one in these works, this recording could allay it. What is lost is the warm, intimate, breathy, pitch-bending sound of the minimally-keyed wooden instrument, but what is gained is the luculent clarity and (in Petri's hands) spot-on accuracy of the recorder. Instruments at period pitch (which for her own good reasons Petri does not use) would restore some of the warmth, but rarely can you have everything—and here you have so much to be grateful for. Her RCA recording of Handel sonatas (9/91) unveiled a 'new-born' Petri, with immediate rather than programmed responses, the consequence of her partnership with Jarrett, to whose jazz-musical alter ego such things are second nature, and the sea change is equally apparent here. The performances are free from distracting mannerisms, flowing as naturally as speech and with recorded balance that supports t...

  This is a stunningly beautiful disc, and can be recommended without reservation to anyone who loves the vocal repertoire. I am not enough of a linguist to know if the Dutch mezzo’s Russian is perfectly pronounced, though I can say her diction is clear with crisp consonants. And the disc has direct competition from Philips 442013—a disc of Tchaikovsky songs sung by the great Russian Olga Borodina. Thirteen of the 20 songs on Stotijn’s disc are duplicated on Borodina’s, and as much as I like this, I would find it hard to recommend that kind of duplication to the casual song collector. But for the serious collector, or to anyone who doesn’t have the Borodina, I will state a slight preference for this disc. One difference is at the piano. Larissa Gergieva plays quite well for Borodina, but Julius Drake is one of the most imaginative and accomplished song accompanists working today, and he brings something special to the piano parts here. But that is not to minimiz...

It seems that there is a trend today for seeking out rare, even previously unrecorded material, for recital discs instead of issuing yet another collection of standard arias. This is a very appealing trend. On this disc there are only two numbers that can be labelled standard arias: Susanna’s Deh vieni, non tardar (tr. 2) and Despina’s Una donna a quindici anni (tr. 10). Mozart’s concert arias are performed and have seen a number of recordings but they can’t be regarded as standards and definitely not the ones recorded here. Cimarosa’s Il matrimonio segreto is occasionally performed but recordings are few and far between. The Cetra recording from 1951 with Alda Noni, Giulietta Simionato, Cesare Valletti and Sesto Bruscantini is sonically dated but vocally splendid; an EMI recording from 1956 boasts a cast including Graziella Sciutti, Eugenia Ratti, Ebe Stignani, Luigi Alva and Franco Calabrese; in 1978 Deutsche Grammophon produced a real winner with Daniel Barenboim ...

The role of interpreter is a delicate one: he, or she, is faced with the score as the sole point of contact with the composer. It is the interpreter’s job to bring a work to life, across distancesin time and space, by making a connection between a personality – often an exceptional one – and ordinary mortals. To achieve this he has to put mind and body at the service of a considerable task: the transmission of art. In music, the word ‘interpretation’ is prone to a number of misconceptions, frequently with unfortunate consequences. Thus we often see two positions set against each other: either the performer must ‘project himself’ in order to give life to the score (to ‘show personality’), at the risk of betraying the spirit of the work; or, on the contrary, he must show the score the utmost respect, so trying to suppress his own personality to give a reading of the work which may well be perfect – but lifeless. Logically speaking, one might think that the correct approach...

 Marcela Rodríguez’s latest opera ‘Las cartas de Frida’ [Frida's letters] , sets out to dispel the ‘folkloric’ myth of Frida Kahlo by showing the artist through her letters.  According to Rodríguez, the greatest threat to Frida’s legacy is Frida herself. ‘We have stopped looking at Kahlo’s art for looking at Kahlo herself’, she told, referring to Julie Taylor’s movie and Robert X Rodriguez’s opera-musical among other recent works. ‘And yet we can’t even see her. All we see is the relationship with Diego, the rave-ups, the myths I’m personally completely uninterested in’.  Rodríguez, a native of Kahlo’s own neighbourhood of Coyoacán, based the opera on the artist’s diaries and letters found in her childhood home of Casa Azul (now a museum).  “I was enthralled by her honesty”, she said. “Her style is beautiful, deeply humorous and scathingly critical of society. She doesn’t shrink from vulgarity either. But this is how we speak here”.  The opera premie...

Vanessa Wagner is keenly interested in the music of her time and devoted to the great repertoires of the past and the present; she brings out admirably the different dimensions that exist in Ravel’s music. In seeking to understand in depth the actuality of Ravel’s works , she reveals their repercussions today. It is very tempting to see in the works of Ravel a reflection of the main trends in the music of our time: minimalism and repetitive structures (Boléro), spectralism (Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, the introduction), a fondness for early styles (Menuet antique), a tendency to take instruments to their very limits (Scarbo), and so on. This temptation, both attractive and perilous, has the advantage of reviving the question of Ravel’s continued relevance today. What does Ravel tell us about our time? What happened to the ‘new school’, for which he prepared the arrival in anticipating the move away from Impressionism? From the Pavane to Gaspard de la nuit, the works of Ravel...

I’m not entirely sure which recording it was of the Schumann Piano Concerto in A minor it was I listened to about 900 times while tackling the work’s analytical nuances for O Level exams in the UK in the early 1980s, but there have been so many recordings since it hardly matters. One new one I’ve heard recently is that with Sophie Pacini on the Onyx label, and this makes a nice comparison with Angela Hewitt’s Hyperion release as the differences are so palpable. Pacini is urgent and dramatic in the Allegro affetuoso first movement, exploring the poetry of the gentler moments with probing notes which highlight each harmonic progression. Hewitt on the other hand is, dare I say it, less old fashioned. Her approach seeks the flow in the music, obtaining a legato in those accompanying moments where the orchestra takes the lead and adding texture rather than making musical points. The superb balance between piano and orchestra allows this to happen naturally a...

Hermann Nitsch is an Austrian artist who works in experimental and multimedia modes. Born in Vienna, Nitsch received training in painting when studied at the Wiener Graphische Lehr-und Versuchanstalt, during which time he was drawn to religious art. He is associated with the Vienna Actionists—a loosely affiliated group of off-kilter and confrontational Austrian artists that also includes Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Nitsch's abstract splatter paintings, like his performance pieces, address the excessive beauty and intensification of human existence. In the 1950s, Nitsch conceived of the Orgien Mysterien Theater (which roughly translates as Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries or The Orgiastic Mystery Theater), staging nearly 100 performances between 1962 and 1998.  Having grown up during the World War II, Nitsch reveals his fascination with the intensity of religious feelings for life in his art work with excessive means such as taboo images, nudity, bloody ...

Despite its brevity, Purcell's Dido and Aeneas holds many charms for audience and performers alike, so it's no wonder that there has recently been something of a boomlet in recordings and reissues (certainly, it doesn't hurt that this mini-sized opera fits easily on one disc). This particular traversal is helmed by the rising young French conductor and harpsichordist Emmanuelle Haïm, whose snap and vigor in this repertoire is immensely appealing. Another real pleasure is getting to know the stylish Concert d'Astrée , whose poise and elegance is a welcome addition to the roster of Baroque ensembles. Haïm keeps the work zipping along at a terrific clip but still gives her soloists plenty of room to luxuriate--and what soloists she has! As Dido, Susan Graham blends her signature warmth with a great deal of sweet wistfulness, particularly in the famous aria "Dido's Lament", in which her melancholy is matched by a chromatically descend...

Japanese-British pianist Mitsuko Uchida continues to impress with recordings that are not so much intellectual as simply well thought out, making a challenging yet extremely satisfying overall impression. Consider the three works by Robert Schumann recorded here. Only the Waldszenen, Op. 82 (Forest Scenes), are well known. The Piano Sonata No. 2 in G minor, Op. 22, is an early but not immature work, composed in 1830 and supplied with a new finale in 1838 at the suggestion of Clara Schumann, who pointed out that while she could play the original version, few others would be able to. There is already plenty to chew on here, for Schumann incorporates motivic links to the first movement in the new finale. Clara was lukewarm about the work (calling it "not too incomprehensible"), but Schumann himself thought highly of it. The genesis of the work is fascinating; it began with a song Schumann composed in his student days, and Schumann incorporated it into an inner voice of the s...

Brian Robins’s review comment in Fanfare 29:3, “Those less concerned with Handelian style will doubtless enjoy the disc more than I have,” uttered after essentially castigating this release, captures my feeling very well. For I feel it an error to always judge performances of Handel by what we think we know he is intending. Robins calls for an “idiomatic” approach in music that has, at the very least, redefined “idiomatic” for the last hundred years. While it is true that many of the tempos here are slower than the current norm, I also think that Emmanuelle Haïm, avoiding any sense of the doctrinaire, wishes first and foremost to take every advantage of her solo instrument at hand, namely one Natalie Dessay. Delirio amoroso is one of Handel’s major cantatas, and is here given a performance worthy of all accolades. One thing that I always try to think of first and foremost in any performance is how good is the singing , and here it is rarified indeed. N...

Heinz Holliger’s lifelong fascination with the music of Robert Schumann finds further expression on this newest release: on Aschenmusik , a new interpretation of the Swiss oboist-composer’s “Romancendres” is framed by Schumann’s own works. “Romancendres” refers to the lost “Cello Romances” which Clara Schumann burned on Brahms’s advice, an act of destruction which outraged Holliger and fuelled the composition of this “music from the ashes” in 2003. It’s a portrait of Schumann, packed with quotations, projected like a lifetime passing through the mind of a dying man. “Romancendres” is prefaced by Schuman’s “Romances” for oboe and piano, masterpieces which have been part of Holliger’s repertoire for 60 years, and by the rarely-played “Studies in Canon Form” which find Holliger on the oboe d’amore. The album closes with Schumann’s first sonata for violin and piano, with cello substituting for violin. Holliger: “Schumann himself thought it could also be played on a cello. I...

British trumpet player Alison Balsom has established herself as one of the leading performers on her instrument in the early 21st century. This 2012 album features three modern and contemporary concertos for trumpet. Balsom is phenomenally secure in her technique and in the musicality she brings to each of the pieces. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Lawrence Renes, and the Scottish Ensemble, led by Jonathan Morton, provide colorful and energetic accompaniment. Bernd Alois Zimmermann's 1954 Trumpet Concerto is the standout work on the album. It is certainly one of the most distinguished, substantial, and immediately appealing trumpet concertos of the 20th century. It is subtitled "Nobody knows de troubles I see," and uses the melody of the spiritual as the basis for its sophisticated musical development. Like many of Zimmermann's works, its themes are political and he changed the title from "seen" to "see" to highlight the ong...

This album of Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s chamber music and songs, mostly of recent vintage, is issued as the innovative Great British composer approaches his 80 th birthday. It features an exceptional cast. Heard together and separately is the trio of Austrian pianist Till Fellner, Georgian violinist Lisa Batiashvili and English cellist Adrian Brendel. They are joined by London-born singers Amy Freston and Roderick Williams. The compositions include “Bogenstrich” written in 2006 as a short piece in tribute to Alfred Brendel and first played by his son Adrian together with Fellner. It was subsequently expanded into a cycle with the addition of settings of Rilke for baritone, cello and piano. The “Trio” is the newest piece , premiered in 2011, a 16-minute single movement work of elaborate patterning, gestures and responses, for piano, violin and cello. Settings of the writings of US Objectivist poet Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), scored for soprano and cello in 1998 and ...

Emmanuel Nunes was born in 1941 in Lisbon where he studied harmony and counterpoint between 1959 and 1963 in the Academy of Music with Francine Benoît. From 1961 to 1963, he followed courses of Germanic philology and Greek philosophy in the University of Lisbon. He undertook summer courses in Darmstadt (1963 to 1965), where he was particularly marked by the courses of composition of Henri Pousseur and Pierre Boulez. The analysis of Momente, by Stockhausen, is seen by Nunes as the most significant stage of his first initiation to composition. He teached composition, since 1981, at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, and, from 1986 to 1992, he also taught at the Musikhochschule of Freiburg-im-Breisgau. Emmanuel Nunes was nominated professor of composition at the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris in 1992. He also pursued his teaching activities at Harvard University, at IRCAM, at the Darmstadt summer courses and at ICONS (Novara, Italy).

This year marks what would be the 150th birthday of the iconic composer, Richard Strauss, and to pay tribute, Deutsche Grammophon releases Notturno, songs by Richard Strauss performed by American baritone Thomas Hampson. Widely recognized as one of the premiere interpreters of German art song today, Hampson celebrates Strauss’ 150th anniversary with several concerts in Europe and North America, along with a new production of the composer’s Arabella which took place in April at the Salzburg Easter Festival. Adding to an already considerable discography and videography for Deutsche Grammophon , the newly released Notturno highlights Hampson’s incredible talents with an expertly-crafted collection of Lieder by Richard Strauss which also includes guest artist Daniel Hope. Hampson stated, “Richard Strauss’ songs provide each of us havens of contemplations as we travel our own paths and discover our own ‘stories’”.

The nuanced and lively playing Emmanuelle Haïm draws from Le Concert d'Astrée is the strongest element in this recording of Bach's Magnificat and Handel's Dixit Dominus. Its colorful, briskly articulated performance is a delight throughout, but the singing of the soloists and chorus lacks the same consistency. The chorus' sound is somewhat murky and doesn't have either the blend or the linear clarity this repertoire requires. Most, but unfortunately not all, of the solo work is beautifully executed, with several lovely individual performances marred by a jarring blooper or ill-conceived interpretive choice. Soprano Karine Deshayes handles Bach's long melismatic lines with remarkable smoothness and breath control, but drops a note, very obviously. Soprano Natalie Dessay sings with her typical purity and incisive clarity, but she lurches into the final cadence of her Bach aria with such surprising vehemence that it gives a jolt. The alto parts lie low for Philip...

Rejecting academic coolness, Armonia Atenea, under the baton of conductor George Petrou, injects dramatic energy and bright colour to Beethoven’s bold ballet score. Beethoven’s ballet music was written in 1801 (between the First and Second symphonies) and the theme from the overture provided the subject for the finale of the Eroica Symphony and Eroica Variations Based on the Greek fire-stealing myth, the story of The Creatures of Prometheus is conveyed with music full of drama and verve, but was the only ballet score that Beethoven wrote. Armonia Atenea and George Petrou’s Decca recording of Handel’s Alessandro has received numerous accolades including the Stanley Sadie Handel Recording Prize, the ‘Complete Opera CD of the Year Award’ at the International Opera Awards, a nomination for the Opera of the Year by viewer of Mezzo TV, as well as being singled out by Classica, Diapason, Fono Forum and the BBC Music magazine. “For all the star quality, the performan...

Handel wrote the secular oratorio Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (The triumph of Time and of Enlightenment) to the text of one of his patrons, Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili, in Rome in 1707. The libretto, which doesn't stand up to close logical scrutiny, centers on Beauty, who must choose between self-indulgent Pleasure and the austerity of allegiance to Time and Enlightenment. Needless to say, any patron entering the theater for the performance, having noted the title on the playbill, would have no doubt about the outcome of the struggle, so dramatic suspense cannot have been one of the inducements for an eighteenth century audience. The rewards, however, are real, most notably Handel's remarkably fertile inventiveness and musical ingenuity, which justified sitting through a two-and-a-half-hour performance that was guaranteed to be a dramatic non-starter. Handel keeps recitatives to a minimum, and the oratorio is rich in musical substance and variety. With this CD th...

Robert Schumann was a great composer. That any debate about this distinction continues, more than 150 years after his death, is inexplicable. In post-Freudian assessments of Schumann’s music, there is a predilection for focusing overmuch on the effects of the composer’s mental illness on his scores, much as critics and scholars seek to attribute every detail of Dame Iris Murdoch’s novels to forewarnings, manifestations, or ravages of Alzheimer’s, but Schumann’s music is a triumph of ingenuity over adversity. Schumann’s significance as a ‘crossroads’ composer of Teutonic Romanticism is nowhere more evident than in his four Symphonies, composed—and, in the case of the score eventually published as the Fourth Symphony in D minor, revised—over the course of a decade (1841 – 1851), when his creative powers were at their peak. Artistically, Schumann’s Symphonies are collectively like a reservoir: having dammed the inflows of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, this quar...

Alban Gerhardt’s profound musicality and charisma have made him one of the most sought-after cellists of his generation. His ebullient personality is present in all his performances; he is nevertheless passionately committed to the intentions of the composer, and his recordings are always the product of an intense personal journey into every aspect of the music. Gerhardt’s espousal of Reger’s cello sonatas and suites is thus greatly welcomed. Pianist Markus Becker has released twelve discs of Reger’s keyboard music and is an ideal interpreter. Reger’s cello sonatas and suites demonstrate every facet of this complex composer and individual. The composer’s passionate commitment to German Romanticism and his neo-Classical inspirations are both here: the great influence by Brahms and then the conscious shrugging-off of that mantle in the face of a complex and progressive stylistic advance. The sonatas span the duration of his career and culminate in the late unaccompa...

This Italian-language, Neapolitan "cantata a tre" from 1708 bears no resemblance (save for the Aci-and-Galatea-are-in-love-and-the-hideous-Polifemo-loves-Galatea-so-he-kills-Aci aspect of the plot) to the composer's better-known English-language Acis and Galatea, written 10 years later in London. The later work includes extra characters and a chorus. Here the burden of the story and music lies with three soloists and an orchestra, colorfully including recorders, trumpets, oboes, and a bassoon in addition to a string/continuo section with a lute or two, organ, and harpsichord. The work is great fun and contains wonderful music, some of which Handel re-used elsewhere: Polifemo's brazen entrance aria (with a few alterations) was later given to the villainous Argante in Rinaldo; other bits show up in Il Pastor Fido and Poro. The characters and situations range from Arcadian perfect love to mustache-twirling wickedness and hard-felt grief (expr...

Judging from the photos used to publicise Anna Prohaska’s new album – one of them is dancing merrily above this review – this gorgeously gifted soprano should have been singing this spin-off recital wearing an army great coat. She compromised with a severe black tunic and trousers with military references and a slight science-fiction cut: she could almost have been a futuristic soldier from the old Korda film Things to Come. In her case the things that came were the complete tracks of her Deutsche Grammophon CD Behind the Lines: songs from around Europe and America about war and the pity of war; songs of drummer boys, valiant grenadiers, mothers, ghosts. Joan of Arc made an appearance too, via Liszt’s dramatic scena Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher. As she launched her programme’s European tour I wondered if Prohaska’s voice – bright, lightweight and magically lyrical – would actually suit a repertoire marked with male bravado, bitter ironies and intense cries of pain. I need not have been ...

Virtuoso trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger's skills are prodigious and seem made to order for the three cutting-edge concertos presented on this 2006 Deutsche Grammophon release . These are not the flashy crowd-pleasers that most players trot out, but serious modern works that derive equally from the avant-garde and neo-Romanticism, as well as from jazz and popular music. Furthermore, Heinz Karl Gruber, Peter Eötvös, and Mark-Anthony Turnage are not generally noted for writing accessible, easily digested music, yet only the most hardened conservative will resist their colorful, dramatic, and highly expressive pieces. The first movement of Gruber's Aerial (1998-1999) has the melancholy feeling of a jazz nocturne, and Hardenberger's sweetly soulful playing makes it an atmospheric reverie. The melodically angular, rhythmically irregular second movement is edgy and perhaps a little difficult to follow in its lopsided activity, but its quirkiness and charm carry the work to an eb...

Several of the composers on this Archiv release - Alonso Lobo, Cristóbal de Morales, perhaps Francisco Guerrero - will be familiar to anyone who has sung in a college glee club. Their short motets, with orderly polyphony that seems to hang in a perfect balance, seem to communicate timeless religious essences. Less common are recordings that situate the music in the Spanish cities where it was composed, and that's not what is here. Although the graphics promise "sacred polyphony of El Greco's Toledo," only the career of the comparatively lesser-known Alonso de Tejeda really overlapped with that of Greek-Spanish master; the rest of the composers worked there earlier or, in the case of Francisco Guerrero, hardly at all (he served there as Morales' apprentice). And even if assigning correspondences between the music and art of a given place and time is a tricky business, the art of El Greco, with its Mannerist distortions of reality, seems almost diametrically oppo...