The fourth broadcast is dedicated to the Early Music Festival 2008 with a recording we made in the Leeuwenbergh Church in Utrecht. In the programme entitled ‘An adventurous musical trip to the east’ La Caccia took Spanish poet, playwright and composer Juan del Encina 1468-1530) as pivot and mapped out a musical travel route filled with exotic colours and sounds.
Juan del Encina (1468-1530) started his musical career as a choir boy at the cathedral of Salamanca but acquired his first important post at the court of Fadrique Álvarez of Toledo around 1492. His ambitions to obtain the position of cantor at the cathedral of Salamanca drove him to Rome around the turn of the century where he found favour with the pope and his cardinals. When Encina is appointed arch deacon of the cathedral of Málaga in 1508, protest arises from the chapter because he wasn’t officially ordained yet. When eleven years later the composer is ordained after all, he undertakes a journey to far-off Jerusalem together with the marquis of Tarifa where he would finally celebrate his first mass. In this concerto programme, The travel report Encina jotted down in La Tribagia o Viaje a Jerusalén is sketched with a rich and varied collection of sounds. Encina’s Spanish roots are not renounced in doing this and nor is the influence of the Eastern, Moorish and Jewish cultures on this Iberian repertoire.
La Caccia is: Melike Tarhan (vocals), Liam Fennelly (vielle, viol), Philippe Malfeyt (oud, lute), Osama Abdulrasol (kanun, percussion), Patrick Denecker (flutes)
Recording technique: Frans de Wolff
Production: Rolf Buijs
