Sacred Music, God's Composer by Tomás Luis de Victoria (review)

Harry Christophers and his Renaissance vocal ensemble, The Sixteen, continue their association with the British Broad-casting Corporation in this documentary of the late-sixteenth-century Spanish composer and organist Tomás Luis de Victoria. Previous releases in this series have included Sacred Music, a four-part exploration of Western sacred vocal polyphony from Léonin onward, A Christmas History, and two live concert films.

This is unmistakably a film intended for television, running just shy of 60 minutes and organized as a broad biographical sketch with appropriate musical examples. In order to fit in the major points and most remarkable details of Victoria’s life, a brisk pace must be maintained. British actor Simon Russell Beale serves as an informed and enthusiastic presenter as he strides through cathedrals, art galleries, archives, convents and palaces while swiftly narrating the composer’s early life, his two decades in Rome and the final homecoming to Spain. Mapping musical form onto literal architecture is a subtle and effective conceit of the script, as when Beale and the camera gaze up at vaulted ceilings of San Antonio de los Alemanes, “founded in 1606 by Philip III in Victoria’s lifetime,” to convey the controlled expansiveness of Victoria’s settings of the Offices for Holy Week.

The Sixteen are twenty-one here, augmented by two extra singers and three continuo players for a fuller sound that remains meticulous and smooth. Annoyingly, the group’s performances are overlaid with mildly relevant but intrusive commentary by Beale and Christophers. The use of subtitles was a shrewd decision, however, as each phrase of music that can be heard as an English translation of its Latin text appears on the screen; Spanish subtitles are also available. Audio tracks of six of the film’s eleven musical performances are included as bonus feature, and The Sixteen have recorded these pieces elsewhere, allowing the intrigued viewer to follow up with, for instance, their complete rendition of Victoria’s Requiem of 1605 (bizarrely, the film concludes with its Kyrie). On the other hand, a performance of the Requiem can last up to forty-five minutes if the motets are included. Perhaps it is better to have a short but sublime excerpt rather than nothing at all, as the selections presented here do give an accurate sense of that work’s intensity.

Also among the disc’s extra features are well-rehearsed interviews with three members of The Sixteen, who speak too briefly of the unique challenges of singing Victoria’s music, and of their lives as members of a professional ensemble now in its fourth decade. Interviews with two of the continuo players are unexpectedly lively and quite long: each offers an accessible and learned survey of the use of instruments in Renaissance music and the status of instrumental musicians in premodern society, complete with what must be one of only a handful of excellent performances available on film of the bajón, the double-reed instrument related to the oboe and bassoon.