A major contributing factor in establishing the pre-eminence of British vocal groups during the opening decades of the early music revival was music in schools, both state and private: expected as standard, taken for granted, providing accomplished singers for amateur choirs and building a firm foundation for singers on the path to train for the professional sector – who among us Brits over a certain age did not grow up singing? Spain, on the other hand, in spite of boasting one of the world’s most opulent and impressive repertoires of medieval and renaissance polyphony, has been playing catch-up, partly because of a lack of guaranteed music provision in schools. Julio López Agudo, tenor and founder of Seville’s A5 Vocal Ensemble, does not mince his words: ‘Spain is a wasteland with respect to singing’. There are wonderful professional early music vocal groups in Spain, of course, such as Jordi Savall’s Hespèrion XXI (founded in 1974), and in more recent times the Iberian Peninsula has produced quality groups such as El León de Oro, Capella de Ministrers and Cupertinos (Portugal), but we should take a moment here to salute the dedication, commitment and struggle required to create and sustain an early music consort of a high professional standard without national music education, and maybe also to ponder a bleak future of choral singing in the UK at many levels, not to mention audience development, undermined by the loss of automatic music provision in our own state schools.

Why, when we have (currently, at least), accomplished vocal ensembles in the UK, should we get to know the new breed of home-grown Iberian talent? Not only do expert Iberian singers bring a unique vocal quality from artists whose first language is Spanish or Portuguese, but also a particular emotional and intellectual engagement arising from true ownership. There is a great deal of early music by outstanding Iberian composers yet to be performed and recorded, and the A5 Vocal Ensemble of Seville is a consort determined to reveal new perspectives on its repertoire of renaissance polyphony. A5 is an SSATB quintet. Julio López Agudo, a singer whose personal journey was unusual, to say the least, says: ‘I was studying psychology when a student created a choir in the Faculty of Philosophy and I accidentally ended up singing there, coming from a pop cover group where I sang songs by U2 or The Cranberries, knowing hardly anything about musical language or theory. I ended up falling in love with polyphony … the early music interest came later, after trying different projects with classical, romantic, contemporary and more experimental music’. Agudo’s four colleagues, including his soprano wife, are conservatory or university teachers of music – he is the only one able to sustain a full-time singing career. They are democratic when it comes to artistic direction and programme planning, with Agudo doing all the marketing, managing and organising. It is his drive that has brought them thus far, and their mutual commitment, hard work and self-belief that led to a debut album, Ave Virgo, a recording of works by the Sevillano maestro Francisco Guerrero (1528-99), recorded in Seville Cathedral. Self-published with liner notes by Mario Guarda, the programme includes seven previously unrecorded works. In its review in 2022, C&O said: ‘Recorded in a massive acoustic, there’s no lack of intimacy, and their phrasing and interpretation evince exemplary commitment and study’. You can enjoy the entire album on YouTube.

The singers feel they owe their burgeoning confidence and expertise to a deep immersion in the madrigals of Monteverdi. In 2016 they began working on a project, unprecedented in Spain, completed in 2022, to perform all his madrigals. They looked for expert advice and collaboration partners, including consulting Paul Agnew (Les Arts Florissants) about historical performance practice and Maria Espada (soprano and Baroque specialist) for matters of appropriate vocal technique.

Agudo has strong views about performance practice for sacred music: ‘Monteverdi’s music has been the best school for singing that we could ever have had, everything that can happen to a singer is there. We believe that there should not be many differences between the way of singing secular and sacred music. We even aim for performing sacred polyphony in an explicitly emotional manner. Some of Guerrero’s motets are full of rhetorical figures, sometimes the music clearly describing the text. It could suggest very emotional interpretations, close to how a madrigal’s interpretation is usually understood’.

It is that great composing son of Seville who is their inspiration (Guerrero, ‘Warrior’, is an apt surname when one considers how the group fights for survival).Overshadowed nowadays by the reputations of Victoria and Morales, he was very highly rated in his day. Guerrero published more than one hundred motets, two books of Masses, Psalms, hymns and canticles for Vespers, music for the Office of the Dead, two Passions, and a collection of religious villancicos in Castilian Spanish. Yet more of his religious and secular music survives in numerous manuscripts in Spain and Central America and much has yet to be recorded. Guerrero spent almost his entire career in Seville in the cathedral’s lavishly endowed musical establishment. He took two trips abroad, to Rome in 1581-2 where he met Victoria, and then to Venice in 1588 on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but this true Sevillano never accepted a foreign post. Beside his talent for composing, Guerrero played the organ, vihuela, harp and cornett and, perhaps most inspiring for Agudo, his successor in Seville Cathedral’s choir stalls, he had a beautiful high tenor voice.

To say that Agudo loves his role singing in the cathedral is a massive understatement: ‘Since October 2023 I’ve been a member of the Schola Gregoriana at Seville Cathedral. Every day we sing the Offices in its wonderful quire, as well as for the most important feasts and solemnities. In the last few years, professional singers have been joining the presbyters in the daily liturgy of the Catholic Church in Seville, as there are fewer and fewer priests who can read music, let alone Gregorian neumes. This has given me the opportunity to enjoy one of the most rewarding musical experiences of my life’. He brings this musical, emotional and spiritual experience to his work with A5 Vocal Ensemble, and it is clear that the cathedral is the group’s spiritual home. ‘We recorded our second album in mid-July 2024, which is also to be dedicated to Francisco Guerrero. We decided to highlight the value of our musical heritage by bringing more of these works to light’.

Musicology is key, of course, especially as this second album will consist entirely of world premiere recordings: ‘For the preparation of our first album we used the editions of Nancho Álvarez, from Málaga University; and we also had the invaluable collaboration of Herminio González Barrionuevo. He was Maestro de Capilla at Seville Cathedral, and the leading expert in Guerrero’s music, and he supported us in making our first album in the cathedral. I must add that in all our projects we always compare the transcribed material with the original sources’.

Little can be achieved without money, of course: ‘Private cultural patronage doesn’t exist in Spain, or involves very small amounts of money. Accessing government financial support is complicated. In our case, we do not receive any kind of institutional support, neither national nor local, public or private. The economic survival of groups is based mainly on getting gigs’. They are good at getting engagements, but the ratio of performance to preparation and rehearsal is economically unsustainable without four out of five singers having ‘real’ jobs. They hope to attract support from the Andalusian Centre of Musical Documentation which has funded pioneering recording projects in the past, but this is set against a backdrop of national indifference to choral music. Agudo says that ‘the Spanish classical and early music market, has, unlike the rest of Europe, prioritised instrumental music over vocal and choral music in a ratio of four to one, as opposed to the European one to one.’

In spite of his characterisation of Spain as a choral wasteland, Agudo is up-beat about the future: ‘The health of Spanish vocal and choral music is more than good, and the level of our singers is increasingly better. Many sing in groups and choirs all over Europe and it is common to find wonderful Spanish singers in groups such as Collegium Vocale Gent, Choeur de Chambre de Namur or Graindelavoix. Just because we don’t see it in our country doesn’t mean that Europe is blind to the evidence that things are changing in Spain’. The next time you read about A5 Vocal Ensemble in these pages it may be a review of the second Guerrero album. After that, what? Agudo suggests that they might bring their unique brand of interpretation to bear on English polyphony: ‘We are already selecting material for new projects in 2025 – including a programme of Catholic polyphony by English composers, which we would interpret “al more Hispano”, to give it a more emotional and rhetorical Mediterranean touch’. Whatever they do, we can be sure that it will be approached with admirable dedication, imagination and energy. In the UK, as we deplore the self-fulfilling prophecy that classical music is elitist, we might learn about resilience from such Iberian ensembles as we face the Sisyphean task of re-seeding the wasteland of our own free-to-all music education system.