Pilgrimage to Santiago

Choral and Song Recording of the Month - BBC Music Dec 2006

BBC Music Magazine Awards 2007: Choral Finalist

"Being a man for great journeys of exploration, John Eliot Gardiner took his Monteverdi Choir on a musical pilgrimage to Santiago in 2004. The concerts they gave along the route have yielded this superb album. All the composers have a connection with Spain, so Morales and Mouton are set alongside Dufay and Victoria, marvellous performances all."
(Gramophone Magazine Editor's Choice February 2007)

In 2004, its fortieth anniversary year, the Monteverdi Choir under the direction of Sir John Eliot Gardiner undertook a pilgrimage in song through France and Northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela, performing in the great abbeys and cathedrals along the way. The choir's pilgrimage programmes focussed on the sacred polyphony of the Iberian peninsula during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these works being set in a broader European context through the inclusion of pieces by composers who worked outside Spain and Portugal, but whose music was probably known there. This recording, the second of two made on the choir's return to London, offers a chance to share their experience of living inside the music along El camino de Santiago.

"Last year, John Eliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir undertook a musical pilgrimage, giving concerts in churches in south-west France and northern Spain that mark the route countless generations of pilgrims have taken to the shrine at Santiago di Compostela. This collection, recorded in the UK in an evocatively resonant church acoustic, intertwines processionals, antiphons and pilgrim chants with some of the masterpieces of the French and Spanish renaissance. Alongside music by Dufay, Palestrina, Lassus, Morales and especially Victoria (including his mass, O Quam Gloriosa), there are pieces from the 12th-century Codex Calixtinus, which contains fragments of the history of the Santiago di Compostela shrine, and from the Liber Vermeli, a 14th-century manuscript still kept in the Benedictine monastery of Montserrat. This is an anthology that has been compiled with scrupulous care. It's beautifully varied and exquisitely sung." 4 stars out of 5 GUARDIAN.CO.UK