"Els Segadors" is the official national anthem of Catalonia, nationality and autonomous community of Spain.
Francisco Guerrero was a Spanish Catholic priest and composer of the Renaissance. He was born and died in Seville.
Jordi Savall i Bernadet is a Spanish conductor, composer and viol player. He has been one of the major figures in the field of Western early music since the 1970s, largely responsible for popularizing the viol family of instruments in contemporary performance and recording. As a historian of early music his repertoire features everything from medieval, Renaissance and Baroque through to the Classical and Romantic periods. He has incorporated non-western musical traditions in his work; including African vernacular music for a documentary on slavery.
Hespèrion XXI is an international early music ensemble. The group was formed in Basel, Switzerland in 1974 as Hespèrion XX by Catalan musical director Jordi Savall, his wife Montserrat Figueras (soprano), Lorenzo Alpert, and Hopkinson Smith. The group changed its name to Hespèrion XXI at the beginning of the 21st century. The name "Hespèrion" is derived from a word in Classical Greek which referred to the people of the Italian and Iberian peninsulas.
Juan del Encina was a composer, poet, priest, and playwright, often credited as the joint-father of Spanish drama, alongside Gil Vicente. His birth name was Juan de Fermoselle. He spelled his name Enzina, but this is not a significant difference; it is two spellings of the same sound, in a time when "correct spelling" as we know it barely existed.
The Llibre Vermell de Montserrat is a manuscript collection of devotional texts containing, amongst others, some late medieval songs. The 14th-century manuscript was compiled in and is still located at the monastery of Montserrat outside Barcelona in Catalonia, Spain.
La Folía (Spanish), or Follies (English), also known as folies d'Espagne (French), La Follia (Italian), and Folia (Portuguese), is one of the oldest remembered European musical themes, or primary material, generally melodic, of a composition, on record. The theme exists in two versions, referred to as early and late folias, the earlier being faster.
Carlos Mena is a Spanish countertenor opera singer. He has previously worked with groups such as Al Ayre Español, Ensemble Gilles Binchois, and Ricercar Consort and has an interest in the twentieth-century repertoire.
Le Concert des Nations is an orchestra using period instruments, which performs the orchestral and symphonic repertoire from the Baroque to Romanticism: 1600 - 1900. The orchestra was created in 1989, the youngest of the groups conducted by the Catalan maestro and viola da gamba virtuoso Jordi Savall. Le Concert des Nations is the first orchestra of its kind made up of musicians who originate mainly from Latin countries. The name Le Concert des Nations refers to the work by François Couperin as an assembly of "tastes" and bears the mark of the Age of Enlightenment. Le Concert des Nations is the orchestra of La Capella Reial de Catalunya.
The Missa Salisburgensis à 53 voci is perhaps the largest-scale piece of extant sacred Baroque music, an archetypal work of the Colossal Baroque that is now universally accepted to be by Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber. The manuscript score of this Mass was rediscovered in the 1870s in the home of a greengrocer in Salzburg, Austria. It has been said to have narrowly escaped being used to wrap vegetables. In the late 19th century, musicologists, notably August Wilhelm Ambros and Franz Xavier Jelinek, attributed it to Orazio Benevoli, and argued that it had been performed in 1628; however in the mid-1970s, through modern methods of analyzing handwriting, watermarks, and history, Ernst Hintermaier "proved...definitely" that it was not by Benevoli. He also demonstrated that it must have been written for the 1682 commemoration of the 1100th anniversary of the Archbishopric of Salzburg. Hintermaier wrote in 2015 that the evidence rules out both Benevoli and Andreas Hofer, Biber's colleague, and concludes that "... the only possible composer of the Mass and the [companion] motet [for 54 voices, Plaudite Tympana] was Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber... both the sources and the stylistic analysis clearly point to Biber as the author of the works."
Lorenz Duftschmid is an Austrian viol player and conductor.
Sophie Watillon was a Belgian viol player who specialized in Baroque music. She was born in Namur, Belgium to a musical family. During her youth, the viola da gamba-soloist gained international fame with refined and sensitive solo interpretations of early music and baroque compositions for viola da gamba.
Montserrat Figueras i García was a Spanish soprano who specialized in early music.
The Cancionero de Palacio, or Cancionero Musical de Palacio (CMP), also known as Cancionero de Barbieri, is a Spanish manuscript of Renaissance music. The works in it were compiled during a time span of around 40 years, from the mid-1470s until the beginning of the 16th century, approximately coinciding with the reign of the Catholic Monarchs.
Xavier Díaz Latorre is a Spanish musician. Born in Barcelona in 1968, he studied at advanced level with Oscar Ghiglia at the Musikhochschule, Basel, graduating in 1993. His subsequent interest in early music led him to study the lute with Hopkinson Smith at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. He has completed several courses in choral conducting and a post-graduate course in orchestral conducting.
Juan Cornago was a Spanish composer of the early Renaissance.
Rolf Lislevand, is a Norwegian performer of Early music specialising on lute, vihuela, baroque guitar and theorbo.
Juan de Triana was a Spanish composer of the Renaissance period, active in the second half of the 15th century during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs. Pope Sixtus IV issued a bull on 9 February 1478 that listed De Triana as Prebendary of the Cathedral of Sevilla for at least a year before. He later moved to the Cathedral of Toledo, where it was recorded that in 1483 he was a teacher of six children in the Cathedral, with a salary of 18,000 maravedíes, a significant quantity at the time. Possibly Triana held this position until 1490, when he was replaced by Pedro de Lagarto. He died in Seville on 28 January 1494, and was buried near the gate of the chapel of the Virgen de la Antigua. In his will, he left a bequest to endow a chaplaincy to sing twenty-five masses a month for his soul at the altar of San Juan Bautista, near his place of burial.
The Cancionero de Segovia or Cancionero Musical de Segovia (CMS), also known as Cancionero of the Segovia Cathedral, is a manuscript containing Renaissance music from the end of the 15th century and beginning of the 16th century. It contains a wide repertoire of works by mainly Spanish, French and Franco-Flemish composers. It is kept at the Segovia Cathedral Archives.
Enrico Onofri is an Italian violinist and conductor specialising in Baroque music.
