Although it comes as a surprise to successive generations of doctoral students, there are still open areas of music where research is sorely needed, where basic information pertaining to who composed what, where and when is yet vague or unknown and where decent performances and recordings are rare or non-existent. Colonial South America, especially Peru, is one of these areas. As musicologists, Peruvian and otherwise, continue to sort through the complexities of source preservation and other issues, several recent recordings have begun to address the lack of recorded music from this area.

Música Temprana's La Esfera de Apolo: Music From 18th Century Lima, Peru is one such recording. Its focus is music composed by José de Orejón y Aparicio, organist and later chapel master at Lima Cathedral from 1742 to 1765. Orejón's music is not completely unknown to American and European audiences. Several of his pieces have been recorded in the past, by Música Temprana and other groups. However, La Esfera de Apolo is the first recording to feature this composer so prominently. This sort of ‘case-study’ disc is invaluable to scholars as well as to the non-specialist audience because it allows for a more complete understanding of Orejón's musical style.

The ensemble Música Temprana is based in the Netherlands but tours widely throughout Europe and South America. The group made its debut in the United States in autumn 2018 at the Latino Music Festival. Its director, Adrian Rodriguez Van der Spoel, founded Música Temprana in 2001, and over its seventeen-year history, the ensemble has released five recordings, all of music from the New World. La Esfera de Apolo is the most recent offering. The singers include two sopranos (Lucia Martin-Cartón and Soledad Cardoso) and a tenor (Fernando Guimarães); the instrumental ensemble is relatively small, with two violinists (Mónica Waisman and Florian Deuter) but a large continuo entourage that includes ‘basse de violon’ (Robert Smith), guitar (director Adrian Rodriguez Van der Spoel), harp (Manuel Vilas Rodriguez), dulcian (Wouter Verschuren) and keyboard (Francesco Corti).

José de Orejón y Aparicio and his music have a particularly fascinating history. Orejón's native town, Huacho, is situated on the central coast of Peru and was an important port city north of Lima. He has sometimes been confused with his teacher Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco (owing to the similarity between the names Torrejón and Orejón), who during the first half of the eighteenth century also held the positions of organist and chapel master at Lima Cathedral. As the capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru, which governed the majority of South America, Lima was a major economic and cultural centre. Much like Mexico City to the north, Lima was the New-World destination for many emigrants and travellers, thus ensuring a relatively talented and stable supply of musicians. As of 1987 Orejón's manuscripts were known to have been stolen and were therefore considered lost forever. Miraculously, however, in 1999 a microfilm of his works was discovered at the Instituto de Investigación Musicológica Carlos Vega in Argentina. The film was digitized and the music transcribed and published.

This recording contains performances of eleven pieces, six of which were written by Orejón y Aparicio. As New-World music often included multiple voices, and very few exclusively instrumental pieces survive, forming a varied programme is often a challenging endeavour. This programme manages to be both varied and nuanced while still representative of the types of works heard in Lima Cathedral. Of the ten works, three are instrumental and (predictably) were written elsewhere. The first of these pieces, the ‘Sonata Coreliana para tecla’ (for keyboard), is anonymous and comes from the music archive of the Chiquitos Jesuit Missions in Bolivia. Curiously, the liner notes for the recording make no mention of what ‘coreliana’ means (in the style of Arcangelo Corelli, perhaps?). Nor do they address the curious decision to divide the sonata in half, and to perform the first two movements (tracks 5 and 6) on the organ, the third movement (track 9) as a duet for guitar and violin, and the fourth movement (track 10) as a trio sonata – with the first and second halves of the piece separated by a villancico. Another sonata from the Chiquitos collection (tracks 15–19) is set for two violins and organ continuo. The final instrumental piece is a short ‘Tocatta al post Comunio’ (track 27) written by the Italian-Argentinian composer Domenico Zipoli and published in Rome.

Conversely, the liner notes offer much information regarding the vocal selections. Van der Spoel rightly notes the theme of ‘duality’ as a prominent feature of José de Orejón's music. Throughout the pieces his training by both Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco and Roque Ceruti, who came to Lima in 1728 from Milan, is evident in the mixture of musical genres, forms and styles. Some of his works are in the typically Spanish villancico genres with an estribillo (chorus) and coplas (verses), for example Por besar de este Fénix (tracks 7 and 8), while others are more Italian, such as Ah, de la esfera de Apolo (tracks 22–26), which uses the recitative and aria forms. However, Orejón seems to have preferred to mix Spanish and Italian forms within the same work, often choosing to start a work with a duet, followed by a recitative and an aria, and finally a set of coplas. In so doing, he perfectly mixed the styles of the two composers who preceded him as chapel master and mirrored what was happening musically in many other locations, both in Spain and in the viceroyalty of New Spain (today Mexico) to the north, where Ignacio Jerusalem and Matheo Tollis de la Rocca were engaged in exactly the same kinds of combinations.

Overall, the recording is very good. The singers, particularly the two sopranos, are excellent and have clear voices that complement each other. They are at home with the Spanish language and the musical styles, and ornament the music elegantly during da capo arias. In my opinion, the two violinists are the highlight of the recording. They stand out by their ability to quickly change styles from languid harmonies in the slower movements of the instrumental works to crisp Italianate rhythms in the arias and duets. They perform with a panache that can be heard even without being seen, and their tuning is crisp. Indeed, the tuning of the ensemble in general is solid, which distinguishes them from many other groups performing South American repertory. Adding the guitar and harp gives the music a distinctly Spanish sound even when the music is predominately Italianate. They do not overpower the delicate blend of styles, though, with unwarranted rasgueado articulations or other markers of Spanish music.

There is, in fact, only one complaint I have with the release; it is not with the music at all but instead with the album art. Why must recordings of Spanish-American music so often include pictures of Native Americans dressed in feathers? The cover art features a photograph of a young boy, presumably Peruvian, with a headdress of bird wings covering his ears. Inside is an additional photo of a young girl wearing a silver crown. The photographer, Luis Gonzalez Palma, titles the cover photo ‘Winged Boy’ and the second ‘Virginal’. This trend of exoticizing the contents is widespread, extending far beyond this recording and group. Realistically, the director and musicians probably had very little or no say about what art was featured on the recording's cover, and it was instead chosen by the label.

Exoticism sells, and this was surely a marketing decision. But regardless of what the label intended, these images communicate that the music might not stand on its own merit: its lack of indigenous-sounding rhythms must be compensated for with exotic packaging, and listeners must be prompted to imagine Native Americans playing and listening to the music. (In the South American reducciones, Jesuit-run settlements in present-day Paraguay, Bolivia and surrounding areas where Native people were relocated, it would have been more likely for Native people to participate in Catholic ritual. However, in Lima, the viceroyalty's capital, this was probably not the case.) Música Temprana's recording La Esfera de Apolo does not need to emphasize a fictional exoticism; the compositions are of high quality and the recording is tasteful. It is highly recommended for scholars and general audiences alike.