Tomás Luis de VICTORIA (1548 – 1611)
Veni Sancte Spiritus (pub.1600) [3:07]
Dum complerentur (pub.1572) [6:54]
Missa Dum complerentur (pub.1576) [29:23]
Popule meus (pub.1585) [4:59]
Vexilla Regis (pub.1585) [8:33]
Veni Creator Spiritus (pub.1585) [6:10]
Pange lingua gloriosi (pub.1581) [6:26]
Lauda Sion salvatorem (pub.1585) [3:21]
Joseph Cullen (organ continuo)
The Choir of Westminster Cathedral/James O’Donnell
rec. March 1996
Texts and translations included
HYPERION HELIOS CDH55452 [69:54] 
This year, the four hundredth anniversary of his death, has seen a plethora
of Victoria. Surely, no year should pass without homage being paid to the
greatest of all Spanish composers. His richness of invention and marrying
of Iberian passion with Roman clarity produced splendour and moving richness
of the kind that Western music has seldom experienced. Truly, Victoria is
astonishing.
Something of that power can be felt in this Helios reissue of a Hyperion original
recorded back in March 1996. It’s sung by the English choir most suited to
conveying the density and polyphonic power of the writing. The programme is
not one to breed complacency, including hymn settings that were, back then,
certainly not on the beaten track of the composer’s discography.
The major work is Missa Dum Complerentur, published in 1576, which
is to a large extent based on his own Motet which had been published four
years earlier. There are a number of features and signatures that recur in
the Mass, not least the Alleluia passages. Naturally the Motet prefaces
the Mass in this performance, so one can appreciate the use to which Victoria
put his original material, and the ways in which he distributed and embedded
them in his full-scale parody Mass setting. The Motet is a compact and artful
work, hugely powerful in its descriptive strength, textually alert, flowing
with unrelenting waves of sound. The Mass is richly voiced, intense in the
Credo but never voluptuous for its own sake; the extra voice in the
Mass adds amplitude but doesn’t detract from the essential clarity and precision
of the writing.
Popule meus is a homophonic setting for Holy Week, and via the purest
and simplest-seeming of ways Victoria ensures that the music achieves a rarefied
and expressive directness. Veni Creator Spiritus, published the same
year, demonstrates the amplitude and intensity of utterance of which he was
so noble an exponent, and, too, the tonal richness of which the Choir of Westminster
Cathedral is capable. O’Donnell directs them with great perception, and direction,
ensuring that pitch is maintained, and that Victoria’s rhapsodic qualities
never congeal. In two pieces, Veni Sancte Spiritus and Lauda Sion
salvatorem, the choir is very ably accompanied by organ continuo, played
by Joseph Cullen.
Amongst the avalanche of issues and reissues to celebrate 2011, this most
accomplished disc should not be overlooked.
Jonathan Woolf
This most accomplished disc should not be overlooked.