Iberian treasures

Abstract

A-R Editions’s Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era series continues to go from strength to strength, and in recent years has opened up a little more to repertory from the Iberian world. The two volumes under review here—Juan Hidalgo’s opera or ‘fiesta cantada’, Celos aun del aire matan, and the complete works of the little-known Roman composer Santiago Billoni, who worked for some years at Durango Cathedral in Mexico—are particularly welcome. The music is of good quality and deserving of performance, and the editions are of the high standard and presentation that will help to make such performance possible. It is fair to say that Louise K. Stein’s edition of the Hidalgo has been a lifetime project: in the Acknowledgements she notes that she began to work on the piece in 1978 as part of the doctoral dissertation on 17th-century secular Spanish opera which laid the foundations for her classic study Songs of mortals, dialogues of the gods: music and theatre in seventeenth-century Spain (Oxford, 1993). As fellow scholars of the 17th-century will know, Stein has continued to research and publish on Spanish musical culture of the Baroque, making a major contribution to the field. This edition, and the introductory essay that precedes it, represent not only due scholarly depth of knowledge, but also the experience of working with performers such as Jordi Savall and Monsterrat Figueras, who brought the work to the public in a series of concert performances in 2000–2001. Celos was also staged at the Teatro Real in Madrid in 2000, with La Grande Écurie et La Chambre du Roy, directed by Jean-Claude Malgloire, based on an edition by the Catalan musicologist Francesc Bonastre. An earlier edition of the music for Celos by the hispanist Jack Sage existed as an appendix to the text edited by the historians of Spanish theatre J. E. Verey and N. D. Shergold, and published by Tamesis in 1970. These editions, however, are either not available or not really serviceable for a modern performance.