A Celebration of Hispanic Music.(BRIEFLY NOTED)(Sound recording review)

A Celebration of Hispanic Music. Santa Fe Desert Chorale / Linda Mack. Clarion CLR924CD, 2006.

This fascinating collection of sacred choral works from Latin America takes in a variety of styles and periods, including works from the baroque and Renaissance periods along with material as recent as Ariel Ramirez's Misa criolla of 1963. Recorded live in Santa Fe, New Mexico in August of 2005 by a twenty-voice choir that convenes in that city only twice per year, A Celebration of Hispanic Music opens with a lively rendition of the Ramirez piece, complete with accompaniment of percussion, recorder, charango, and harpsichord. The choir as a whole sounds wonderful, but tenor soloist Matthew Tresler is especially impressive on this work. The Mass is followed by two songs from the Valdes Codex, both in honor of the Virgin and both written in the Aztec dialect of Nahuatl by the Spanish composer Hernando Franco; rhythmically lively but traditionally harmonized and structured, these two brief pieces offer a gem-like illustration of the musical confluence between the old and new worlds in the late sixteenth century. Antonio ...