New release – Salve, Salve, Salve: Josquin's Spanish Legacy
We’re delighted to announce the release of our latest recording on Signum Classics, devoted to the music of the three great composers of renaissance Spain: Morales, Guerrero and Victoria.
There was a craze for the music of Josquin Desprez in sixteenth-century Spain. All three of the greatest Spanish composers of the age – Morales, Guerrero, and Victoria – were directly inspired by one particular rhetorical effect developed by Josquin: ostinato, the repetition throughout a piece of a musical motto. This disc explores Josquin’s legacy as manifest in the motets of Morales, Guerrero, and Victoria, and in Victoria’s great six-voice Missa Gaudeamus. In the hands of such composers the use of ostinato produces results that are dynamic, compelling, and striking in expressive impact. These works show the Spanish composers not just emulating Josquin but also competing to outdo him in inventiveness.