The Music of Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla
VOICES & INSTRUMENTS
Tutor: Clive Walkley
Friends Meeting House, Lancaster
Reviewer: Terry Wareham
A jolly group of singers and instrumentalists met on 9 November in the tranquil and spiritual surroundings of the Friends Meeting House in Lancaster. Clive Walkley had promised us “an opportunity to perform some of the exciting and rhythmically challenging music by the Spanish composer Juan Guetierrez de Padilla”. And he was certainly accurate in his description of our day. Exciting and rhythmically challenging it was! There was a very good balance of voices (c 20) and instruments (a bass viol, five recorders, two cornetts) and the acoustic in the main Meeting Room was sympathetic to the music. We seemed to tackle a tremendous number of pieces, including reading some original manuscript. The music varied from the reasonably accessible to the downright head-scratching with its wayward rhythms and syncopations. But given that we were a group with various levels of experience and musical ability that seemed about right. The logistics of providing the right music copies to the right people at the right moment proved a stretch at certain points, but at least that gave us a bit of a breather, ready to clamber up the next mountain peak.
Clive is an excellent workshop leader – erudite without being obscure, challenging without being in any way critical of our wobbly bits, humorous, well-prepared. It was a joy. The practical arrangements worked really well, in particular the lemon drizzle cake we were treated to towards the end of a long and delightful day.
Terry Wareham
First published in February 2025 Newsletter
