Antonio Juanas: Premiere Recordings of Selected Choral Works Antonio Juanas (c1762–c1821) Collegium Mundi Novi / R. Ryan Endris (conductor) Centaur CRC3663, 2018; one disc, 64 minutes

Abstract

The most prolific composer of music in the colonial Americas, Antonio Juanas (c1762–c1821) served as the last chapel master of Mexico City Cathedral before Mexican independence. A native of Spain, Juanas wrote liturgical music in multiple styles, including a cappella polyphony and galant works for chorus and small orchestra, as appropriate for cathedral ritual. He also organized and inventoried the cathedral’s music archive, shaping the compositional legacy of the colonial period into more or less what exists today at the Archivo del Cabildo Catedral Metropolitano de México (ACCMM). As part of this endeavour, Juanas – like other chapel masters – made numerous arrangements and contrafacta of works by his predecessors, especially Ignacio Jerusalem (1707– 1769). Juanas left annotations in the original scores that document his interventions, which range from the addition of new oboe parts to the composition of substantial new sections of music to accommodate a contrafacted liturgical text. Despite his large oeuvre and interesting historical role, Juanas has attracted few professional performing groups, and the vast majority of his works remain unedited. Thus the release of Antonio Juanas: Premiere Recordings of Selected Choral Works, with Collegium Mundi Novi featuring Variant 6 conducted by R. Ryan Endris, is both thrilling and revelatory. Endris, who prepared the performing editions using microfilms from the ACCMM music collection made under the direction of E. Thomas Stanford and Lincoln Spiess in the 1960s, offers a generous and varied selection of repertory for Vespers and Matins services. While none of the pieces is a liturgical reconstruction, Endris does grant listeners a series of independent Vespers psalms, a collected Vespers service consisting of two psalms and a Magnificat, a setting of the antiphon ‘Regina caeli’, a lamentation for Holy Week and a cycle of eight responsories for the Feast of the Holy Trinity: seventeen pieces altogether. In his selection, Endris has privileged psalm settings in minor keys, including a Lauda Jerusalem in B minor (ACCMM, Papeles de música, A0284.01), a Credidi propter in G minor (A0258), a Beatus vir in E minor (A0287.01) and a Vespers service in E minor (A0288) (the call numbers may be used to consult further information about these works in the music catalogue at www.musicat.unam.mx). These minor-mode pieces are relatively rare in the late colonial repertory (as they are also, for example, in Haydn or Mozart), and they involve greater harmonic complexity and perhaps more varied tonal colours than some of the major-mode works by Juanas do. Altogether, the album presents an attractive and dignified repertory illustrating functional Catholic church music of the 1790s and early 1800s. Few recordings of any comparable music from the Spanish world exist; stylistic comparisons might be made with the slightly older composers Francisco Javier García Fajer (1730–1809) and Gaetano Brunetti (1744–1798), who were active in Spain. In approaching the music of Juanas, Endris has made some intelligent and historically fairly appropriate performance decisions. For example, he retains a small ensemble consisting of only