Missa Mexicana (2002)

With this collection of seventeenth-century music from Mexico, Andrew Lawrence-King and the Harp Consort offer that rare performance that's both intellectually challenging and terrifically fun. The disc includes a mass by Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla, a Spanish composer who came to Puebla, Mexico, to take a post at the city's magnificent cathedral. Lawrence-King fragments the mass into its individual movements and intersperses secular pieces among them, aiming to demonstrate -- well, what exactly? The album, Lawrence-King ... Read More

With this collection of seventeenth-century music from Mexico, Andrew Lawrence-King and the Harp Consort offer that rare performance that's both intellectually challenging and terrifically fun. The disc includes a mass by Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla, a Spanish composer who came to Puebla, Mexico, to take a post at the city's magnificent cathedral. Lawrence-King fragments the mass into its individual movements and intersperses secular pieces among them, aiming to demonstrate -- well, what exactly? The album, Lawrence-King warns, is "a musical exploration, not a liturgical reconstruction"; the Padilla mass would never have been performed this way, although some of the secular xácaras might indeed have had a liturgical function. Instead, writes Lawrence-King in the liner notes, the mass "breathes the spirit of the dance," a spirit especially strong in the music's New World surroundings. The hearer may or may not agree -- dance rhythms were part and parcel of the language of seventeenth-century music... Read Less