I listened to this disc with mixed feelings. On the one hand, these performances of songs and instrumental music from renaissance Spain are entirely unobjectionable: the playing and singing (mostly by Geraldine McGreevy, but with some interventions from Harvey Brough) are fine – at least in as far as intonation, ensemble and so on are concerned – and the collection of pieces from the Palace Songbook and a few other sources is nicely varied. In these respects, the recording neatly plugs a gap in the Naxos output; if it is possible that, with the multifarious recordings of Spanish renaissance music issued in the wake of 1992, anyone has missed out on this repertory, then no doubt they can and will acquire a taste for it listening to this super-budget CD.
On the other hand, I felt as if I were experiencing a time-warp: the now traditional approach to performing the repertory, with a wide spectrum of instrumental colours, percussion included, and the selection of many of the same items that have by now made it on to disc over and over again, made me wonder what the last 20 years of the ‘early music revival’ have really been about. Time here seems in many ways to have stood still since the days of Munrow (who, of course, made a pioneering recording of this repertory). This sinking feeling of deja vu was reinforced by reading in the booklet-notes that the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella resulted in the whole of Spain being “under direct rule from Madrid” (well, not until a century or so later), and that “One way to avoid the problems posed by an apparently incomplete text is to perform such a work instrumentally”. Such an argument suits instrumentally based ensembles in need of reclaiming repertory, but bypasses issues that have been raised by recent research.
Am I being too hard on a recording which, if one chooses to ignore all this, is attractive enough and not without its merits (notably the vihuela-playing of Jacob Heringman)? I certainly would not wish to condemn it, but forgive me if I cannot recommend it wholeheartedly; if early music is to enrich and illuminate (wherein, I believe, lies its attraction and meaning for us), it needs to continue to explore and to show more originality than is on offer here.'