# The New World Baroque: Torrejon’s Lima Cathedral Music
There are moments—rare enough—when a album opens a window onto a musical world you barely knew existed. This K617 disc of music by Tomás Torrejon y Velasco, composed in late seventeenth-century Lima, is one of them.
Torrejon’s story reads like something from a picaresque novel. Born in Spain in 1644, he entered service with the Count of Lemos and wound up following his patron to Naples, then across the Atlantic when the Count became Viceroy of Peru in 1667. Within a decade Torrejon had secured the choirmaster’s position at Lima Cathedral—the most prestigious musical post in the Americas at that time. He remained there until his death in 1728, presiding over what must have been an extraordinarily sophisticated musical establishment.
The music on this disc bears that sophistication out. Gabriel Garrido and his Ensemble Elyma have done careful editorial work here, reconstructing scorings and performance practices with evident scholarly rigor. You can hear it in the confidence of the interpretations. The instrumental forces are deployed with real authority—particularly Jean Tubéry’s cornett playing, which provides those marvelous ornamental decorations that Neapolitan training would have encouraged. His work in “A este sol peregrino” has that perfect balance of rhetorical gesture and vocal inflection that the best cornettists achieve. Rarely.
The secular villancicos that open the program reveal a composer of genuine imagination. “Cuando el bien que adoro” and “Es mi rosa bella” show Torrejon absorbing influences from across the Spanish empire—Italian melodic sophistication, Spanish harmonic boldness, and something else, perhaps indigenous rhythmic patterns filtered through European conventions. The soprano soloists (alas, unnamed in the documentation) navigate these stylistic crosscurrents with impressive assurance. Their ornamentation feels improvisatory without becoming excessive, and their sense of text declamation suggests they’ve actually thought about what these Spanish and Latin texts mean.
But then we come to the Coro de Niños de Córdoba. Oh dear.
I understand the historical argument for using children’s voices—Lima Cathedral certainly employed them. But understanding the argument doesn’t make listening to these performances any easier. The pitch is consistently flat, sometimes painfully so. The vowel production lacks uniformity, creating a choral timbre that grates rather than blends. These may be young singers, but youth needn’t mean technical incompetence. The training here simply isn’t adequate for music of this complexity. In the Nisi Dominus psalm, where the children carry substantial musical responsibility, the interpretation wobbles dangerously close to embarrassment.
It’s particularly frustrating because the adult singers from Ensemble Elyma are so good. The Mass for six voices proves what this music can sound like when performed by technically secure musicians who understand the style. Garrido’s direction finds drama without melodrama, devotion without sentimentality. The instrumental ensemble—strings, theorbo, organ, and Tubéry’s cornett—provides a foundation that’s both rhythmically vital and harmonically clear.
The Dixit Dominus that closes the disc reminded me, oddly enough, of Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers—not in specific musical gestures but in ambition, in the sense of a composer marshaling all available resources to create something magnificent for liturgical use. Torrejon had clearly absorbed the lessons of the Italian baroque while developing his own voice. The antiphonal writing, the solo-tutti contrasts, the way instrumental color reinforces textual meaning—this is sophisticated compositional craft.
At forty-seven minutes, the disc feels short. Given the quality of the music (when adequately performed), another fifteen or twenty minutes would have been welcome. The packaging is handsome, the booklet design stylish. But then you read Guy Strudwick’s English translations and wince. “It is not hard to picture Torrejon through all the documents thanks to which all western man can leave proves of his crossing in life…” What on earth does that mean? K617 needs a better translator. Urgently.
Still, despite the children’s choir and the mangled prose, this remains an important release. Torrejon deserves to be better known, and Garrido’s advocacy is persuasive. The music from Lima Cathedral stands comparison with contemporary European work—not as provincial imitation but as genuine artistic achievement from a sophisticated colonial capital. That alone makes this disc worth hearing, flaws and all.
