As Vozes Alfonsinas
nas Redes Sociais
Realizando Um Ideal Sonoro
Performing an Ideal Sound
Há 29 anos
29 years ago
Performing an Ideal sound
To what extent do the Vozes Alfonsinas distinguish themselves from the other groups dedicated to medieval and Renaissance music? The answer lies in the sound result.
It is true that on the basis of this result is an original research on the oldest musical sources of the Iberian Peninsula and a careful selection of the repertoire; even when it is not unpublished pieces, which has happened many times, many transcriptions have been made or reformulated again, and it has been used, more than once, to read directly from original facsimiles of documents. The programs are built taking into account not only the rhythm of the show but also the historical coherence of the musical sequence. All of this can be distinctive vis-à-vis groups that rely primarily on second-hand materials, and do not integrate them into a wider cultural perspective; but the truth is that the Vozes Alfonsinas also sound distinctively.
What might determine this sound? Of course, the individual qualities of the musicians who act in each moment such as: the skill and sensitivity of the musicians, the timbre and the elasticity of voices ... and in this respect, the members of the Vozes Alfonsinas are exceptional. However, there is something that unites these qualities and guides them toward common ends, allowing a consistent sound image to come off the set.
Invisible, verbally disjointed, often misunderstood even by those who follow it, the musical direction suggests Ideal sounds , which throughout the rehearsals, the concerts, the recordings, are acertained and penetrating the interpretation. Time, diction, tuning, phrasing, rhythmic articulation, improvisatory variation, fusions, and contrasts are aspects whose collective control depends on the sharing of a common sound ideal.
And because they work and present themselves as an old music group, Vozes Alfonsinas puts text and voice at the center of interpretive work; in this they devalue the kaleidoscopic palette and informality in vogue in the 1960s and 1970s, approaching the attitude later developed in contrasting ways by Christopher Page's "Gothic Voices" and the "Ensemble Organum" by Marcel Pérès.
The result is that the Visigothic or Gregorian chant never sounded like this, with a rhythmically varied but slow line, soberly carved, almost pasty, placing the text at the center of the meditation; the Holy Mary Songs were never as comprehensible, as felt as narration; never the polyphonic song of the fifteenth century sounded so colorful and subtly energized; never the Iberian songs of the sixteenth century were so clear and together said, so close to us, so assumed as vocal pearls.
It is true that the recordings of Martin Codax's songs by Helena Afonso (1986) or Dom Dinis's songs by Paul Hillier in Harmonia Mundi (1994) sound a bit like Vozes Alfonsinas; but this may be the result of the same direction of rehearsals and recordings also executed here by Manuel Pedro Ferreira.
Vozes Alfonsinas are accompanied by exact copies of period instruments that try to reproduce the sounds that would then be heard in churches, palatial halls, convents, castles, and even outdoors.