Rosa das Rosas: Cantigas de Santa Maria, Spiritual Songs for the Virgin

Album review

From Spain on outward across Europe, recordings of the Cantigas de Santa María have proliferated. In the U.S., despite the strong roots of small-group medieval music in that country, they have been considerably rarer, and between the coasts almost nonexistent. Thus, it's a pleasure to encounter the Rose Ensemble, of St. Paul, MN, and to find it receiving praise from European press outlets. The group's take on medieval music is unusual and worked out to quite a degree of detail, which is all to the good. It's not exactly "authentic," although in their basic emotional commitment to the music and avoidance of the feeling that they are presenting something antique, these 12 musicians show themselves to be part of the latest early music wave. What's most unusual is the program. The Cantigas de Santa María were a group of several hundred monophonic songs, putatively in praise of Mary but really, like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, illuminative of various aspects of life in medieval times. They were compiled, and perhaps in some cases composed, by King Alfonso X of Castile and León, known as El Sabio, in the thirteenth century. The Rose Ensemble combines these with other "spiritual songs for the Virgin" dating from as much as three centuries later: polyphony by the Spanish composer Juan del Encina, Italian laude, and even a full-scale Renaissance motet by Francisco Guerrero. The Cantigas themselves are accompanied quite minimally, perhaps by just one of the small collection of stringed instruments (plus a cow bone) used by the group. Thus, the polyphonic pieces create an impression of comparative lushness. For the listener who has heard a lot of recordings of the Cantigas de Santa María, these contrasts may be something like suddenly throwing music by Beethoven into a recital of Elizabethan virginal music. But for general listeners the sequence of pieces, all linked by their Marian themes, may make perfect sense. For the singers themselves it certainly seems to; they land in an intriguing space between English purity and Spanish gutsiness, and they have impressive pitch control throughout in a challenging small-group context. They respond to what they're singing about when they render the vivid storytelling of the Cantigas, rendering the titles of the individual pieces as spoken introductions. The texts of each piece, including these titles, are given in their original languages (Galician-Portuguese for the Cantigas, Spanish, and Italian) and English; booklet notes are in English only. A campus music auditorium at the remote University of Minnesota at Duluth makes a reasonable stand-in for a medieval palace or monastery. Recommended, especially for newcomers to medieval and Renaissance music, for these performances make the music come alive.
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