Cantoría, Christmas under gunpowder smoke: Spanish ensaladas

Forget nice scenes with straw and oxen. In 16th-century Spain, Christmas sounded like an explosion of popular joy! For the occasion, Cantoría serves the tastiest ensaladas: polyphonic, mixed ‘salads’ in which languages, styles, and melodies tumble over each other. Mateo Flecha raised the genre to an unseen level: his pieces are full of theatrical effects, political allusions, and winks to popular culture. Wars against Turks, emperors, Lucifer, and Christ: everything passes by in a swirling stream of sound and rhetoric. Fragments of superhits, panting rhythms, dueling voices: what begins with appropriate chastity ends in theatrical overdrive. With voices, vihuela, viola da gamba, percussion, and organ, Cantoría turns this renaissance hit machine into a sparkling Christmas party with historical swagger.