Guerrero: Le Voyage en Orient – Le Banquet du Roy

A stone church in the Berry countryside, its acoustics still faintly smelling of centuries of incense and damp — this is where Olivier Gladhofer’s ensemble Le Banquet du Roy chose to record its imaginative reconstruction of a journey most listeners will never have heard of. Francisco Guerrero, maestro de capilla at Seville Cathedral for the better part of four decades, made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1588 and wrote it up a couple of years later as El viaje de Jerusalén — part travelogue, part spiritual memoir, wholly Andalusian in its mixture of piety and appetite for the exotic. Gladhofer’s idea, and it is a good one even where the execution wobbles, was to score that journey: alternating Guerrero’s villancicos with the actual musics of the lands he passed through, rather than merely gesturing at them through Spanish Orientalism the way, say, a nineteenth-century composer might have.

Guerrero himself is criminally under-recorded outside his native Spain. We get the Officium Defunctorum now and then, some motets, the odd Missa. But the villancico repertory — those vernacular Christmas songs collected in the 1589 Canciones y villanescas espirituales — rarely gets aired complete, and rarer still gets aired next to actual Levantine and Greek liturgical material rather than some vague modal pastiche cooked up by a well-meaning early-music arranger. That alone makes this disc worth a producer’s gamble.

Does it work as listening, though? Mostly.

The instrumental villancicos come off best, frankly. Stripped of text, they become pure Iberian dance-song, and the ensemble plays them — vihuela, sackbut, whatever reedy thing is buzzing away underneath — with an easy, unforced swing that never curdles into museum-piece stiffness. I’d happily hear these excerpted onto a separate playlist; they have a life beyond the concept album that contains them.

Gertrudis Vergara’s voice, when she takes “Al resplandor de una estrella,” has that slightly veiled, almost smoky quality some listeners will find ravishing and others will find imprecise. I lean toward ravishing. There’s a hush in her upper-middle register that suits the image of the Star of Bethlehem rising over a darkened landscape — one imagines candlelight, not concert lighting.

But it’s the Eastern material that actually justifies the whole premise. The Greek hymn “Meth’imon o Theos,” sung by Abdallah and Homsi, stopped me cold on first listen — the vocal ornamentation coiling and uncoiling with a freedom no Western notation could fully capture, the drone underneath breathing rather than sustaining. This is where the disc stops being a clever curatorial exercise and becomes something closer to revelation. You hear, suddenly, why Guerrero’s own travel account is so entranced by what he encountered — the strangeness, to Iberian ears, of music that moves by different intervals entirely, that ornaments where Spanish polyphony would resolve.

Sequencing deserves praise too. Rather than dutifully following Guerrero’s itinerary — Spain, then the boat, then the Levant, in tidy chronological blocks — Gladhofer interleaves the repertories throughout, so a Sevillian villancico might suddenly give way to an unaccompanied Levantine improvisation, then swing back again. It keeps the ear alert in a way linear programming wouldn’t have. Whether it’s historically “authentic” is beside the point; it’s dramaturgically smart, and this is, after all, meant to be a musical entertainment rather than a musicological monograph.

Do I have reservations? A few. The blend between the period-instrument Western forces and the more improvisatory Eastern musicians occasionally feels like two ensembles recorded in adjacent rooms rather than one unified conception — intonation systems brushing up against each other without quite reconciling, though maybe that friction is the honest point. And the church acoustic, gorgeous as it is for the polyphony, sometimes swallows the more intimate solo improvisations, robbing them of immediacy.

Still — measured against the thin field of recordings that attempt anything like this cross-cultural conversation (one thinks of Jordi Savall’s various Mediterranean projects, which cast a long shadow here, inevitably), Le Banquet du Roy holds its own through sheer freshness of concept and evident scholarly care. Not a first choice if you want Guerrero’s sacred polyphony played with maximum weight and gravity. But as an evocation of a Renaissance Spaniard’s astonished encounter with the wider Mediterranean world — its bazaars, its chant, its strange and exquisite otherness — this disc has real imaginative heat. Recommended, with enthusiasm outrunning caution.