theartsdesk in Cuenca: Religious Music Week

It’s Holy Wednesday in Cuenca, and going round the corner into Cathedral Square I’m surrounded by hordes of guys in multicoloured mufti who look like the Ku Klux Klan, with unnecessarily pointy hoods. Twenty of them are carrying a heavy float with a large statue of Jesus on it. In Cuenca things are fairly austere, compared to other places where there’s a lot of self-whipping, or where, if you have sin on your conscience, you may end up banging nails into your hands, as in Mexico. Still there are alternative amusements – the Copa Del Rey final of Real Madrid v Barcelona is blaring out of bars – and it’s the 50th edition of Cuenca’s Religious Music Festival.

In the last year, Cuenca has been connected by the AVE fast train, and it’s now only an hour or so from Madrid. You zoom along the uninhabited flatlands and hit the high sierras, arriving at a spanking new rail station with massive glass windows, plonked improbably in the mountains five kilometres outside the city. Not so far from here is where the spaghetti westerns were filmed, Italian directors going to Spain with a dream of the old American West.

The rail station is like a futuristic portal, a glass temple into other time zones – the old part of Cuenca is one of the most atmospheric medieval towns I’ve seen, with houses and seminaries somehow stuck on the top of sheer cliffs and the winding pathways it seems rude not to get lost in.

The religious music festival goes in for a lot of cultural time travel and musical archaeology, kicking off with “fragments of monody” unearthed from the Historical Archive in Cuenca, with rediscovered liturgies, a series to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Spanish Renaissance composer Tomas Luis de Victoria, and the Spanish premiere of Les Talens Lyriques's recovered sacred music drama Li Prodigi della divina grazia nella conversione e morte di San Gugliemo, duca d’Aquitania - "The Conversion and Death of St William, Duke of Aquitaine", in a more manageable English title. Until revived by Christophe Rousset, Les Talens Lyriques’s dynamic director, the drama hadn’t, astonishingly enough, been performed for 280 years but it’s an utterly convincing and delightful piece and fits right into the canon. Someone should put this tremendous music in its entirety out on disc forthwith.

The young string players swung with enthusiastic verve and the lead part of St William was sung with soulful conviction by soprano Raffaella Milanesi, although rather higher than her range was the Devil sung by male soprano Paolo Lopez. As ever, the Devil got the best tunes in the tussle for William’s soul – who dropped out of his sophisticated court to become an ascetic and a saint, with one jocular follower with a pronounced Neapolitan accent. Backstage afterwards Milanesi was fretting about being “too emotional” – I said it was like hearing Aretha Franklin. Rousset reinforced the rhythm of the piece with his strongly accented harpsichord playing – the marked syncopation made this piece strangely contemporary. As for poor Pergolesi, like many a star before and since, he died tragically young, at the age of 26, in 1736, the Jimi Hendrix of 18th-century Italy.

Watch Rousset, Les Talens Lyriques and the cast rehearsing the work

Pergolesi certainly was a striking looker if his portrait (pictured below right), presented by his biographer Florimo to the court of Naples, is accurate. Florimo’s most luridly romantic tale (though colourful details in the biography have been questioned) was that Pergolesi gave musical instruction to and fell in love with Maria Spinelli, a Neapolitan noble's daughter.

Maria’s brothers told her they would kill Pergolesi unless she married someone worthy of her station in life. She instead decided to go into a convent, asking only that music for the mass when she took the vows be directed by Pergolesi. She died one year later in 1735 in the Santa Chiara convent. Pergolesi directed the funeral mass. Within the year he apparently died of a broken heart. His Stabat mater, the one masterpiece he has been universally recognised for, and which the Les Talens Lyriques have also recorded with great aplomb (see video below), was perhaps inspired by her.

After the concert, Rousset talked to me of the popularity of festivals like Cuenca, with its early music emphasis, and how this, together with the rediscovering of the neglected Baroque masterpieces that he covers (as does William Christie, who Rousset worked with for years), has gradually shifted the centre of gravity of classical music backwards to the 18th century and earlier. Another subversive side effect of bringing lesser-known composers to light is to undermine the essentially Romantic and 19th-century idea of a few towering geniuses. It may be that we are now less in tune with composers from Beethoven to Wagner who believed in Romantic ideas like the revolutionary remaking of the world.

Watch Les Talens Lyriques and Rousset perform an extract from the Stabat mater

Plenty of the music of the festival, of course, had no known composers, like Thursday morning's appealingly titled concert in the Church of La Merced, The Liturgies of the Faenza Codex 117 (1380-1420), which was another kind of musical archaeology. This was taken from a mass that, according to the programme notes, “had been erased and written over by Johann Bonadies in 1574, and restored using digital technologies in February 2004”. For such ancient music, digital reconstructions like this make it a dynamic, fluid field of research for the multi-award-winning medieval ensemble Mala Punica. Even so, they still have no idea exactly which musical instruments were used. They guessed using 15th-century harpsichords and assorted organs; around passionate, trancey singing these wove curlicues of sound like the flourishes of an exuberantly illustrated sacred book.

Mala Punica sing from La musica liturgica del Codex Faenza 117 in a film made at the Ravenna Festival

That evening the pianist Alexandre Tharaud brought some relative modernity with an intense piano performance at the newish Teatro Auditorio. This had as its fulcrum some mystical piano pieces from Erik Satie written at the time he was the official composer of the Ordre de la Rose-Croix Catholique. Tharaud appears to be a sober, upright, slightly austere performer, and brought a lot of weight even to the overly familiar first two Gnossiennes (see video below).

Actually, I had a Proustian moment listening to these endlessly enigmatic pieces – I first properly heard them as a student and played them incessantly one weekend while reading a book on Tibet and drinking Lapsang Souchong. Hearing the music triggered memories of the smoky tea and the pictures of Tibet. Sometimes these associations stick – in this case the visionary nature of these pieces with their mysterious sonorities lends itself to imaginings of hidden Eastern kingdoms. As it was the eve of Good Friday I also found myself thinking of John Donne's poem Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward - "Hence is't, that I am carryed towards the West/ This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East". Tharaud was slightly less at home in jauntier, later Gnossienes, where Satie, who dressed in a green corduroy suit - a boulevardier who played cabaret piano - comes to the fore.

Alexandre Tharaud plays Gnossienne No 1

Some of Debussy's most Satie-like pieces from the Preludes: Book 1 followed, although as Debussy put it he had a more pagan spirituality - “Nature’s mysteries are my religion.” What was something of a revelation to me was Liszt’s In festo transfigurationis domini nostri Jesu Christi. This piece was far removed from the flashy, rock-star exuberance most people associate with Liszt, but is meditative, finishing with crystalline chords which Tharaud impressively gave time to breathe.

The only part of the programme which stuck out was Beethoven's E-major piano sonata Op 109, played with aplomb by Tharaud but compared to the minimal, introspective music that preceded it, this was like an electric-guitar solo in the middle of a Gregorian chant.

After a walk up the steep hill, past the famous hanging houses and to the town square in the early hours of Good Friday, I ran into more Ku Klux Klan lookalikes. This time, it was the Firemen's Brotherhood, only a decade old, who dress in white and red. They were carrying yet more statues of the suffering Jesus. Each of us have our own ways of cleansing our souls, I guess. I think I prefer Satie, or listening to sacred music, to bashing nails through my hands or wearing pointy headgear.

• Website of Cuenca Religious Music week
• Find Christophe Rousset on Amazon
• Find Alexandre Tharaud on Amazon