Orquesta Barroca de Granada / Íliber Ensemble / Darío Moreno SEBASTIÁN DURÓN La Guerra de los Gigantes

                                               LA GUERRA DE LOS GIGANTES

Orquesta Barroca de Granada / Íliber Ensemble / Darío Moreno SEBASTIÁN DURÓN La Guerra de los Gigantes

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.

Eva Juárez / A Corte Musical / Rogério Gonçalves SEBASTIÁN DURÓN Lágrimas, Amor...

Sebastián Durón is one of those composers whose turbulent life story, combined with an exceptional musical output, can end up leaving nobody indifferent. He was born in 1660, in Brihuega, a small municipality in Castilla-La Mancha and was the younger brother of another important Spanish composer, Diego Durón (1653-1731), who became the maestro de capilla in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. At the age of nineteen, Sebastián embarked on his musical career as assistant organist to Andrés Sola in the cathedral of San Salvador (La Seo) in Zaragoza. In the following years, he travelled across mainland Spain to be employed as second organist in the cathedral of Sevilla (1680), and first organist in the cathedrals of Burgo de Osma 1685) and Palencia (1686). During the course of this time he was ordained as a priest. 

By now, his fame as an organist and as a composer was already such that in 1691 King Carlos II appointed him to succeed the organist José Sanz, who in that year was going into retirement. Durón quickly became one of the favourite Madrid court composers, as much for his religious music as for that for the stage. During this period, Durón also took the opportunity to work for high-ranking families of the nobility, such as the Dukes of Osuna and the Counts of Oñate. The absence of the official maestro of the Real Capilla, Diego Verdugo led increasingly to the musical responsibilities falling upon Durón until, in 1701, with the arrival of the first Spanish Bourbon king, Felipe V, Durón was appointed maestro of the Real Capilla as well as rector of the Real Colegio de Niños Cantorcicos.

Valentina Álvarez PIRAMIDAL Barroco Hispanoamericano

To call the music on this album "barroco hispanoamericano" is to stretch the truth. A few of these Spanish Baroque composers worked in the New World; a few are represented in Spanish American archives stretching from California to Montevideo; and some do not even have that tenuous connection. The Mexican Urtext label's presentation is beautiful, with an epigraph from Sor Juana Inès de la Cruz supplying the album's title. But what we have here is essentially a century's worth of Spanish Baroque music, showing the gradual ascendancy of the Italian styles that conquered Spain and its American dominions as surely as they did France. Many of them are unfamiliar to listeners outside the Spanish-speaking world, so this recording of mostly sacred soprano arias (as the liner notes nicely put it, "the very life of composers during this time is often a game of mirrors between the sacred and the mundane") is a welcome addition to the literature. 

The question mark for the potential buyer is the voice of soprano Valentina Álvarez. It's quite unusual, a delicate yet throaty thing that plays fast and loose with the pitch but is attractively involved with the clearly enunciated text, and you'll either love it or hate it. Fortunately, the advent of Internet samples makes it easy to determine which one; she is perhaps at her best in the six small arias by Vicente Martín y Soler (who, for goodness' sake, moved to Italy, Austria, and finally Russia, heading away from the New World all the while) that conclude the disc. (James Manheim)