Jordi Savall, Pedro Estevan - La Lira d'Esperia II: Galicia (2014)

This 2014 release is a sequel, 20 years on, to one of Jordi Savall's most successful earlier albums, 1994's La Lira d'Espéria. The "lyre" of the title is the set of descendants of Greek stringed instruments in use during the Spanish golden age: the vielle, its Islamic counterpart the rebab, and the rarer rebel morisco, all three of which are played by Savall on this recording. (Hesperia was the Greek name for the Iberian peninsula, and for Italy as well.) The difference between this second volume and the first one is that the present release focuses on the music of the Galicia region, ruled in the 13th century by Alfonso X, known as El Sabio, the Wise. Alfonso, who appreciated both the Islamic and the Jewish scholarly traditions, was a poet and composer (or perhaps compiler) who left more than 400 songs known as the Cantigas de Santa María. There is considerable iconographic evidence that these were sometimes performed as instrumental melodies, and that's what Savall does here, weaving the cantigas together with Galician folk materials that survive in oral tradition. Savall is a musician known for imaginative reconstruction of lost repertories, but here he justifies his musical choices in some detail. What gives his performances of this material its haunting quality is the presence of the heavily bearded percussionist Pedro Estevan, one of the most fascinating of Savall's roster of contributors over the years. This music may seem sparse, but it has proven both historically interesting and commercially successful; it's absorbing and stands up to repeated hearings, revealing something of the complex society from which it sprang.