La Grande Chapelle’s new album offers the world's first recording of sacred music by Carlos Patiño, King Philip IV's chapelmaster

The new album from La Grande Chapelle ensemble, released last Friday, offers the world's first recording of sacred music by Carlos Patiño (1600-1675), chapelmaster to King Philip IV’s Chapel for 30 years. The recovery of this Baroque composer’s works is part of a research project developed by the director and musicologist Albert Recasens at the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra.

To carry out this project, he consulted numerous archives that preserve the legacy of the Spanish master, such as those that belong to the monasteries at Montserrat and El Escorial, which holds the main collection of his works in Latin, as well as those at the cathedrals of Avila, Burgos, Cuenca, Valencia, Las Palmas, Valladolid, Segovia, Salamanca and Santiago de Compostela, and the National Library of Catalonia, among others. He also retrieved documents preserved in the New Continent, from Guatemala City and Puebla, Mexico.

In 1634, Patiño became the first non-Franco-Flemish chapelmaster at the Spanish Habsburg court. “Formed in the cathedral tradition, under the direction of Alonso Lobo in Seville, he developed his own musical style that combined an interest in counterpoint with a polychoral style,” Albert Recasens notes. Likewise, he pointed out that, during his three decades in the service of the King Philip IV, “Patiño’s music became a standard for Spanish and Latin American cathedrals.”

“He is one of the great masters of the Baroque period,” Recasens remarked, “and an innovator in his native country, having integrated elements of European modernity.” His influence, according to Recasens, was decisive for the following generations of Hispanic composers: “Elements like harmonic daring or the importance of the text’s rhetoric continued to be present in great later figures like Cristóbal Galán, Sebastián Durón or Francesc Valls.”

For the album, Recasens selected some of Patiños’s most emblematic religious compositions in Latin from his extensive vocal corpus, which were written for important court ceremonies. The director and musicologist details that the first part of the album is devoted to the Virgin Mary and includes pieces such as Ave Regina caelorum, antiphon for the Purification 8, the Salve, Regina antiphon 4, and the Litany of Our Lady 7.

Unpublished version of the motet Maria Mater Dei

It also offers an unpublished version preserved in Segovia of the motet Maria Mater Dei, one of Patiño's favorite compositions. “We know this because he had himself portrayed with her in the painting that remains of him; this is also the only painting that stills remains of any seventeenth-century Spanish musician,” Recasens detailed.

The second, more varied part highlights the music dedicated to the Office of the Dead (Libera me, Domine and Domine, quando veneris), as well as the Pentecost sequence (Veni, Sancte Spiritus 9), in which the contrast between soprano and a double chorus stands out.

Carlos Patiño: Música sacra para la corte  (Carlos Patiño: Sacred Music for the Court) is part of the CSIC's early music collection called “Musica Poetica” (Poetic Music). It was released with the sponsorship of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) (High Council for Scientific Research) and the Consejería de Cultura y Turismo de la Comunidad de Madrid (Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Community of Madrid). It was recorded in September 2020 at the Church of San Quintín in Sobral de Monte Agraço (Portugal) despite numerous logistical difficulties derived from the pandemic.

Last February, La Grande Chapelle performed Patiño’s music in public for the first time in four centuries at a concert that opened the 31st edition of the Festival Internacional de Arte Sacro (FIAS) (International Festival of Sacred Art).

_{^{El disco se grabó se grabó en septiembre de 2020 en la Iglesia de san Quintín en Sobral de Monte Agraço, en Portugal, con numerosas dificultades logísticas derivadas de la pandemia.}}

Webinar: Carlos Patiño: Sacred Music for the Court

Day: Tuesday, June 1st

Time: 18:00 h. (GMT+ 2)

Link: Zoom