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The Elvas Songboook
When working on the Iberian songbooks of the Renaissance, a courious and remarkable feature becomes instantly evident; how immensely rewarding the musical result is. The music is good, very good indeed and is strikingly well written. Wonderful simplicity and crystalline musical textures are combined with poems of astonishing lucidity and wit. The Elvas songbook is a clear example of this way of doing.
This codex is one of the extant four renaissance Portuguese songbooks. It was possibly copied between 1560 and 1570 and the music is written by Iberian composers with their lyrics both in Portuguese (16 pieces) and Spanish (49 pieces).
The majority of the works are anonymous. The only known composers are Juan del Enzina and Pedro de Escobar. They are credited with four pieces each.
El Canto del Caballero is offering the whole corpus of Portuguese pieces from this songbook for the very first time. Aiming for uncompromising quality and artistic fidelity, for this project the ensemble collaborates with the excellent Portuguese singer Orlanda Velez Isidro.
Background music: "De vos y de mí quexoso" (Elvas Songbook) performed by Alfred Fernández