Christina Pluhar’s Latest I

NOTE: All of the music on this program comes from recordings featuring L'Arpeggiata directed by Christina Pluhar. For complete information:

https://arpeggiata.com/

I. Orfeo son io. Deutsche Grammophon 4867597.

Tenor Rolando Villazón, music ensemble L’Arpeggiata and its founder-director Christina Pluhar release their new album Orfeo son io. Based on a conceptual programme devised by Pluhar that is inspired by Greek mythology, the album takes in works by Monteverdi and his contemporaries as well as by Gluck, Gardel and Bonfá. 

Villazón first worked with Christina Pluhar and L’Arpeggiata when he made his role debut as Monteverdi’s Orfeo in a concert performance at the Musikfest Bremen in 2016. The success of their collaboration resulted in numerous other performances around Europe. In 2021, the artists reunited to premiere Pluhar’s Orfeo son io programme, again at the Musikfest Bremen, and again leading to further acclaimed concerts together.   

Rolando Villazón has joins forces with period instrument ensemble L’Arpeggiata and its founder-director Christina Pluhar to present an album inspired by the myth of Orpheus. The recording is based on a conceptual program devised by Pluhar which the artists have also performed live to great acclaim. Villazón sings excerpts from Monteverdi’s Orfeo and operas on the same subject by Gluck, Peri and Sartorio, as well as 20th-century songs by Carlos Gardel and Luis Bonfá. Directed by Pluhar from the theorbo or Baroque harp, L’Arpeggiata also weave instrumental works by lesser-known Renaissance and Baroque Italian composers into their Orpheus narrative. “In an inner journey of the soul,” explains Pluhar, “Orpheus tells us about falling in love, the huge joy of his wedding day, the terrible grief unleashed by Eurydice’s death, his desire to save her, and his final farewell to her.” Villazón vividly conveys every emotion Orpheus experiences with beauty and sincerity. “For me,” says the singer, “Orpheus is much more than a mythical figure – he is a mirror of our deepest human truths. Every time I embody him on stage, I am struck by the purity of his fragility and the strength he finds through music. He teaches us to embrace longing as a source of beauty, and to believe in the miraculous power of music to keep love alive.”

II. La Torre del Oro. Warner/Erato 5026854302492.

Named after the 12-sided ‘golden’ tower that dominates the River Guadalquivir in Seville, La Torre del Oro is the latest album from Christina Pluhar’s ensemble L’Arpeggiata. Pluhar is renowned for her ability to create innovative programmes that combine composed music with folk music – this album focuses on music from Spain, Central America and South America. La Torre del Oro features performances by singers Céline Scheen, Luciana Mancini and Vincenzo Capezzuto, with a variety of featured instruments including the baroque guitar and harp, Venezuelan cuatro and harp, cornetto, harpsichord, accordion and maracas. 

La Torre del Oro includes pieces by Spanish composers Alonso Mudarra, Diego Pisador, Lucas Ruiz de Ribayas and Santiago de Murcia, heard in context with the jácara, fandango, folía, canario and ciaccona and the Venezuelan joropo and pájarillo. The programme also features works by South American composers – namely, Reynaldo Armas, Simón Díaz, Ignacio « Indio » Figueredo, Agustín Rivas, Hilda Herrera and Violeta Para.

From Gramophone: Christina Pluhar continues to be one of the most persuasive and, frankly, funky musical chameleons of the current moment. While she may not be the first to take a voyage from Spain through South America, the level of fluency in this release is quite breathtaking. Named after a 12-sided watchtower (a regular dodecagon if you prefer) near Seville that once overlooked the Spanish galleons as they set sail for the New World and returned with plundered treasures, musical or otherwise, this is the same musical exchange that once captivated David Munrow who, travelling to Peru in the early 1960s, was entranced by similarities between instruments of the European Renaissance and modern folk instruments. Like Munrow, Andrew Lawrence-King (especially on ‘La púrpura de la rosa’ –DHM, 7/99) and many others, Pluhar has created an album infused with a range of sounds from bright harpists and brushed percussion to the urgency of the maracas, and the dazzling fluency of the guitarists that feeds directly back into her Baroque specialism. All work together to create the crowd-pleasing musical mischief that we have come to love from L’Arpeggiata.

Spanish composer Alonso Mudarra (c1510-1580) looms large in this programme, his early dates always somewhat surprising considering his three publications from the mid-1540s show a notably humanistic approach to text-setting with refined contrapuntal accompaniment – an early Spanish Dowland, if you like. Here Claros e fresco ríos inspires the clear and gentle sounds of Doron Sherwin’s cornett as it flows into Céline Scheen’s voice with such unfussy synchronicity that Michael Praetorius’s comment in Syntagma musicum (1619) springs to mind.

Of the following generation, the guitar music of Madrid-based Santiago de Murcia (1673-1739) rubs shoulders with New World influences. His Fandango – presented here in a modern arrangement – is outrageously good, quite the vehicle for Manuel A Sánchez, whose playing and singing feature strongly throughout this programme. In particular his opening to the Venezuelan Cumaná 500 años is irresistibly fluent, and when Pluhar splices in a romanesca by Mudarra it’s ingenious, if not a touch contrived. The connection might have been more subtle had the two pieces simply occupied adjacent tracks: I’m not always in favour of early music mash-ups. But the place to start with this album is perhaps Yo vengo regando flores by the extraordinarily named Agustin ‘Chupa Caña’ Rivas, who, one assumes, was fond of sucking sugar canes. I digress. Anyway, it is a merengue, a Venezuelan song in mixed metres that demands movement, and Luciana Mancini’s vocals are slickly engaging, the clarity of her rolled Rs never impeding the joyful tumble of words as she scatters the song’s metaphorical flowers.

I have sometimes lost track of Pluhar’s own voice in her fusion projects but not with this one. Just as the torrent of joyful music-making rests on the extraordinary skills of the musicians, Pluhar herself modestly stays under the radar by design since her programming is the key to success here. I could write earnestly about musical structures crossing the ages, but this sequence of pieces makes that clear without drawing undue attention to its musicological underpinnings. A delight, through and through.