Lux Feminae (900 - 1600) [CD with 172 page comprehensive book]

Hybrid/SACD - playable on all compact disc players

"Drama, passion, sorrow and joy - the magnificent Figueras is in her element...Drama, passion, sorrow and joy - the magnificent Figueras is in her element"
(Editor's Choice Gramophone October 2006)

Choral and Song Recording of the Month (BBC Music Aug 2006)

"Montserrat Figueras's wonderfully upholstered anthology from the middle ages and renaissance in the Iberian peninsula comes complete with a copiously illustrated 160-page book, providing images to complement the history traced by these songs on female texts, as well as translations of them in seven languages. There are settings here of prayers by St Teresa d'Avila, of Sephardic laments and poems by female troubadours and a ravishing setting by Martin Codax from his cycle Cantiga d'Amigo. Figueras sings them all with her bewitching combination of dark-hued intensity and crystalline purity and, as always with Hesperion XXI collections, the pace is varied - the moments of rhythmic abandon counterpointed with those of rapt introspection. Wonderful colours emerge from the accompanying ensemble with its harp, psalteries and viols too, and on some numbers Figueras is joined by a quartet of singers that includes her daughter Arianna Savall. Altogether it's the best kind of musical archaeology, and performed with imagination and unquenchable enthusiasm." GUARDIAN UK 4/5

"Lux Feminae is a musical meeting-place, a space in which music invokes the essence of the feminine: its message, its strength, its pain, its sacral dimension and its light. These words and music spanning from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance focus on the central role of woman in Hispanic culture, whether Christian, Jewish or Muslim, illustrating the rich, profound and multi-faceted myth of the universal feminine. As authors, the source of inspiration or dedicatees, women have enriched a musical heritage which ranges from the traditional Song of the Sybil, the Hispano-Arabic jarchas and the Galician-Portuguese Cantigas de Amigo expressing the woman's longing for her beloved, to the mystical poems written by Saint Teresa of Jesus, popular lullabies, passionate devotional saetas sung during Holy Week to images of Christ and the Virgin, and Sephardic Jewish ballads."
(Montserrat Figueras)