- Main performer: Gregorio Paniagua
- Booklet languages: English, French, German
- Time: 44:10
Review
La Folia de la Spagna by the Atrium Musicae de Madrid is certainly not your garden-variety early music realization. Led by Gregorio Paniagua and recorded in June 1980, this Spanish group takes the seventeenth century dance La Folies d'Espagne and submits it to an enormously diverse series of variations that are by turns serious, nutty, and sometimes outright weird. This is in keeping with the group's earlier and trailblazing album Musique de la Grèce Antique, which in some passages substituted noisemaking for missing material in papyri eaten away by the ravages of time. While it was hardly a conventional solution for the problem of lacunae, it did serve to make the extant part of the melody comprehensible in the way blank plaster might help marry the appearance of a mural that has lost large chunks of its paint.With La Folia de la Spagna instruments are used that fall nowhere near what would be normally acceptable in early music, such as the clarinet, jew's harp, and vibes. The album comes off sort of like a film directed by Federico Fellini and starring Spike Jones; it is deliberately silly in spots and even contains some in-studio type chatter one would normally associate with the Beach Boys, whose recordings are heavily cluttered with such moments. However, where else can one hear a duet for jew's harp and sitar, leading into the sound of a passing garbage truck? Like a pop "concept album," La Folia de la Spagna is constructed of little segments on tape that have been pulled together into "suites." These bear titles that should serve as a dead giveaway to Latin speakers that La Folia de la Spagna is not one of your standard brands, such as Dementia praecox angelorum and Sine populi notione Vagula et blandula.
La Folia de la Spagna may impress some listeners, particularly those who consider themselves hardcore devotees of period authenticity, a little like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. Nonetheless, the key attribute of La Folia de la Spagna is imagination; how far can we take this? How far can we go? Such an attitude cannot fail to lead to solutions that lead to provocative and renewed treatments of old music. One does not have to look very far to see the connection from this to the early music cum bluegrass idiom of the Baltimore Consort or the righteously rocking approach to medieval dance music practiced by the Dufay Collective. While it might not succeed as a "pure" realization of anything recognizable as early music, La Folia de la Spagna does succeed spectacularly well as a post-modern transformation of the concept of early music realization, and in this respect is in itself a pioneering, landmark work. ~ Uncle Dave Lewis, All Music Guide
Performances
| Composer | Title | Time |
| Gregorio Paniagua | La Folia de la Spagna, for ensemble | 44:10 |
