Although the National System of Children and Youth Orchestras and Choirs of Venezuela (known as El Sistema) is globally recognized for its contribution to the promotion of Western classical music, the cultivation of art music in Venezuela began some centuries ago, as a result of conquest and colonization by the Spanish Empire. Venezuelan and Latin American music research was initiated with the nineteenth-century publication of Ensayos sobre el arte en Venezuela by Ramón de la Plaza (1831–1886).Footnote ¹ Since then, Venezuelan music historians such as José Antonio Calcaño (1900–1978), Juan Bautista Plaza (1898–1965), Antonio Calzavara (1944–1988), José Peñín (1942–2008), Walter Guido (1928–2003) and Mario Milanca Guzmán (1948–1999), among many others, have worked with all available primary source material, in order to analyze, understand and reconstruct the heritage and canon of Venezuelan art music.Footnote ² An important landmark for Venezuelan art music history was the 1935 discovery of manuscripts at the Escuela Superior de Música y Declamación ‘José Ángel Lamas’ by the school's director Ascanio Negretti (1897–1949) and the composer and Cathedral of Caracas Chapel Master, Juan Bautista Plaza (1898–1964). These archives contained Venezuelan music from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote ³

Scholars and musicians have also used recordings to appreciate Venezuelan music, and the recording under review here includes vital contributions of musicologist David Coifman. A defining feature of this recording is the collaboration between the musicologist and the performers, who have gained international recognition because of their command of the repertoire of early Latin American and Spanish music.Footnote ⁴

David Coifman explains in the CD booklet that the church authorities made reforms that defined the ‘new style’:

The recording begins with Gloria (composed before 1770) by Ambrosio Carreño (1721–?1811), who worked as a Chapel Master at the Cathedral of Caracas between 1750 and 1778. According to Coifman, in the accompanying text, this movement was written as part of a Mass (of which only this movement survives) and ‘constitutes the last vestige of the baroque style phased out by the Caracas Diocese during the 1770's full musical renovation and which led to the musical scores written in that style being quickly put aside and forgotten’ (CD booklet).

The next piece is a Magnificat composed by Pedro Osío (1728–1806) in 1778. This antiphonal work is for three voices (SAT) and basso continuo.

The following four consecutive works by José Antonio Caro ‘de Boesi’ (1758–?1814) are Misa de Difuntos (1779), Misa a Dúo (ca. 1780), Tantum Ergo (1781), Christus Factus Est (1783) and Dexter Domini (1783). All show compositional practices typical of the epoch, including contrasting contrapuntal and homophonic textures, stilo concertato and word painting.

The Camerata Barroca de Caracas and the Collegium Musicum ‘Fernando Silva-Morvan’, conducted by Isabel Palacios, use period instruments and historically informed performance, that achieves balance, lucidity and finesse. Both the choir and soloists perform their melodic lines with full-bodied phrasing, introspection and good tone. This is in contrast to earlier recordings made by Vicente Emilio Sojo and Nazyl Báez-Finol (1932), which employed a romantic performance perspective.

David Coifman makes a remarkable and vital contribution to this volume; he is responsible for finding some of these pieces and reconstructing some of them according to the practices and styles of the period. Moreover, Coifman displays a profound understanding of the liturgy, enabling him to provide highly detailed notes, in both Spanish and English, on each work, as well as the composers’ biographies.

The biographies of Isabel Palacios and David Coifman are also included, together with the history of The Camerata Barroca de Caracas and Collegium Musicum ‘Fernando Silva-Morvan’. The booklet is illustrated with images of historical manuscripts, including documents signed by Pedro Palacios y Sojo (1739–1799) and Pedro Osío (1728–1806), a map of Caracas in 1775 by Don José Carlos Agüero, a 1764 allegoric lithography on the foundation of the San Felipe Neri Oratory in Caracas. The album cover shows an anonymous painting Nuestra Señora de Caracas from 1766 (album cover). In fact, photos of the ensemble and choir in twentieth-century clothing are the only details not conforming to the period design. Perhaps such photos would be better omitted, to avoid breaking the illusion. Produced with the generous support of the Banco Mercantil, the long-awaited release of this repertoire achieves a simple and pure, yet striking representation of what remains an ‘obscure chapter’ of the history of Western art music.Footnote ⁵