Description
Francisco Guerau: Poema Harmónico
Xavier Díaz-Latorre, guitar (3 CD Box)
In 1694, a singer-priest at the Spanish royal chapel published a book unlike anything else written for the baroque guitar. Francisco Guerau (1649–1722), born in Palma de Mallorca and trained from age ten at Madrid’s Real Colegio de Niños Cantores, called his collection a Poema harmónico — a harmonic poem. The title alone signals its ambition: where his contemporaries wrote guitar music mixing strummed chords with plucked lines, Guerau composed entirely in punteado style, dense with counterpoint, and asked for every chord to be arpeggiated. Santiago de Murcia, writing twenty years later, praised it as a book no guitar enthusiast could claim not to have seen — “exquisite passacalles,” played with “consummate skill.”
Guerau’s world was the Royal Chapel of Charles II, a monarch he served as chorister, singer, and eventually chamber musician, and to whom the Poema harmónico was dedicated. He rose to become Master of Music at the Boys’ Choir in 1694, only to vanish from the historical record after the Bourbon reforms that followed Charles’s death — likely marginalized, as a Mallorcan, during the War of Succession that followed. He died in 1722, having never published the second volume he had promised.
Xavier Díaz-Latorre’s complete recording — thirty passacalles paired by mode, plus jácaras, marizápalos, pavanas, gallardas, folías, and more, across three discs — is the fruit of years spent with this notoriously demanding repertoire. Faced with Guerau’s silence on questions of tuning and stringing, Díaz-Latorre moves between seven different configurations depending on key and texture, and allows himself brief improvised interludes in the dance-derived pieces, restoring some of the context a seventeenth-century listener would have brought instinctively.
Recorded in Paris’s Chapelle de Notre Dame de Bon Secours, on five-course guitars by Julio Castaño.
Booklet: EN, SP
