CRITIC OF MUSIC. The united voices

LUIS HIDALGO MARTÍN

Landarbaso Choir
Director: Iñaki Tolaretxipi.
Songs by: Donostia, Loti, Rachmaninov, Mendelssohn, Raminsh, Eslava y Miskinis. Place: Church of ‘San Juan de los Caballeros’ (Museum of Zuloaga).
XXth Week of Sacred Music of Segovia.

One more year the Week of Sacred Music of Segovia is the main cultural reference of the first days of the Passion Week. And again the absence of more firm institutional and private support left the impression of a lost oportunity to create a project more ambicious that finally could confirm this interesting and convinient event to the place that, almost throughout the region, it desevers.

On its twentieth edition the Week offers a total of six concerts, that having the beautiful church of “San Juan de los Caballeros” as stage and with a programme mostly vocal, that includes songs from the Renaissance untill our days, conform a suggesting programme with different propositions, someone unique, comparing with the habitual of the musical offering of the city along the year.

Something that normally is not absence on the last editions of the Week, and that seeing the artistic results it should be maintained at the next Weeks, it is the performance of a choir from the Basque Country or Navarra. This time it was Landarbaso Choir, composed by therty-nine singers with ages between seventeen and therty-three years old, that offer a select programme, from the Baroque until the actuality.

Difficult Songs

The performance of Landarbaso choir was developed on one part, at which all the songs, independently of the style, were characterized for its beauty and the emotion that the choir, excellently conducted by their young and communicative director Iñaki Tolaretxipi, show with an interpretation of great vocal union, with solidity and of a very high thecnical quality.

The preparation of the singers of the choir permit them to confront and perform successfully songs of a great difficulty, like the “Kyrie” and “Gloria” of the “Misa Brevis” by Vitautas Miskinis, whose Gloria is one of those pieces of music that reached to the level of a master work and only by itself can justify any concert, or the exquisit Ubi Caritas by Raminsh, that on its music express honestly the bounty of the latin text. If the more contemporary songs were distinguished by its subtlety and dramatic power, the romantic ones like “O Iesu mi dulcissime”, “Ave María”, “Her, nun lässest du deinen Diener” and “O Salutaris Hostia”, composed by Donostia, Rachmaninov, Mendelssohn and Eslava, were characterized by the great dynamism and the passion, on the other hand the clarity on the conduction of the voices defined the interpretation of the counterpointed “Laudate Dominum” by Antonio Lotti.

Only three little details, like the ocasionals and and very little doubts in some of the beginings, the hurry of some of the spectators for applauding, and a bit delay at the begining, detract lightly a concert that ended with a cheerful encore that show the other face of sacred music.