Tomás Luis de Victoria: La fiesta de Pascua en Piazza Navona

Easter celebrations in the Piazza Navona. T. L. de Victoria and the Spanish Confraternity of the Resurrection in Rome The confraternity of the Resurrection of S. Giacomo degli Spagnoli – the Castilian national church in Rome – was responsible, from 1579 onwards, for organizing the Easter celebrations in the Piazza Navona, one of the most spectacular public festivities during the time of Spanish supremacy in Italy.

For the solemn procession, which took place before dawn, the square would be decked out with ephemeral constructions and allegorical scenes, accompanied by lights, fireworks and music provided by the finest singers in the city situated either in platforms or in the procession itself. Indeed it was organized as a symbol of the hegemony of the Spanish nation and functioned as a powerful propaganda tool. As a member of the confraternity, Tomás Luis de Victoria was associated with the procession before his return to Spain in 1585. This double CD offers a never before undertaken evocation of the music that might have been heard in the church and around the square during this most important of Roman celebrations.

It brings together an enormously varied selection of vocal and instrumental pieces by composers who, together with Victoria, were either involved in the organisation of the festivities (such as Francisco Soto or Ruggiero Giovanelli) or whose music was preserved in the S. Giacomo degli Spagnoli archive (Jacobus de Kerle, Giovanni P. da Palestrina, Giovanni Animuccia, Rocco Rodio and Francisco Guerrero). This superb recreation, as well as offering us a new reading of Victoria’s work, submerges us, in a wholly new way, in the sonorities that he would have been familiar with in the latter part of his Roman period: from sumptuous polychoral works with Venetian influences to the simple laude spirituali associated with the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri. In short, it is another first for La Grande Chapelle, establishing a context in which to place one of the greatest composers of the Spanish Renaissance.