Cantigas Centenales – Musica Antigua

Choir & Organ (Nov, 2014)
Eduardo Paniagua founded the group Musica Antigua specifically to perform and record the music of the 13th-century Spanish King Alfonso X, ‘El Sabio’. Some two dozen discs later, Cantigas Centenales finds them featuring the ‘hundredth’ cantiga from Alfonso’s collection of 427 spiritual songs, plus the manuscript’s prologue and epilogue. Translucent improvisatory instrumental arrangements, effortlessly convincing and confident, underpin Cesar Carazo’s flexible singing with psaltery, harp, flute, percussion and more, bestowing bred-in-the-bone veracity. a trek up and over the Pyrenees leads to Nuits Occitanes occupying a related soundworld, with languishing flutes, plaintive fiddle, subtle percussion and characterful soprano and counter-tenor delivering dramatic texts for Ensemble Celadon’s inventive, heartfelt tour around the music …