CATHARSIS – Purification of a soul that has been through a tragic and painful state.
Cantaderas’ proposed program gives shape to one of the most important periods of the liturgical year: Easter time. Its importance is due to a repeating transformation: sorrow turns into happiness; grief into hope and sadness is replaced by joy. The miracle of the resurrection does not stay locked away in the church but arrives in every aspect of daily life. The old becomes new, nature revives and the end becomes a beginning. The Easter week with its rituals and ceremonies has always been experienced as a tragedy, a theatre piece that permitted the spectator to identify with Jesus‘ resurrection, unleashing an internal catharsis: redemption of one’s sins.
The program proposed by Cantaderas highlights this transformation with a repertoire that transports the listener from the image of pain to joy: from lent to Easter Sunday, from winter to spring, from the end of a natural cycle to the beginning of a new one.
The medieval repertoire selected comes from the Florence Manuscript dated to the 1240s. This Manuscript includes a collection of monodic Conducti known as Rondelli. Another medieval source comes from a well known manuscript that contains music from the same sourece of Notre Dame Repertoire: Las Huelgas (Burgos, Spain). Cantaderas has chosen conducti and organa for 2 and 3 voices, examples of a beautiful poliphonic texture in the XIII century.
The traditional repertoire chosen to frame this medieval repertoires are pieces from the provinces of Teruel, Cantabria, Burgos, Seville and Salamanca, collected in different songbooks from the beginning of the XX century. Pieces sung by the people inside and outside the temple, liturgical and paralithurgical pieces, monodies and polyphonies express dramatically the grief of a son’s death and the joy of his resurrection.