Musica Ficta

Musica Ficta, a Spanish ensemble, emerged as an influential presence in reviving and performing early music from Spain, a repertory that had long received limited attention from interpreters. The group has appeared on international stages and issued more than twenty albums that extend well beyond Spanish works into varied stylistic territories. Multiple ensembles have adopted the Musica Ficta designation, taken from a historically contested practice in which performers supplied unwritten accidentals, above all in choral settings. A separate Colombian group employs the accented Spanish spelling “Música,” while the ensemble founded in 1992 by Raúl Mallavibarrena retains the original Latin spelling. Mallavibarrena, a Spanish choral conductor and guitarist, cultivated a strong interest in early music and continuo realization; he also established the instrumental Ensemble Fontegara, which has frequently collaborated with Musica Ficta in performance and on disc. He created the independent label Enchiriadis, its name drawn from an obscure medieval theoretical treatise, and the imprint has released many of the ensemble’s recordings. Musica Ficta has toured throughout Europe and, less typically, the Middle East. Its catalog is distinguished by its breadth, beginning in the mid-1990s with releases devoted to landmark Renaissance Spanish choral works by Victoria, Guerrero, Morales, and others. As the group matured it turned to less familiar territory, producing an album of Pedro Ruimonte’s Spanish madrigals and another drawn from the Cancionero de Turín songbook. In the mid-2000s it focused concerts and recordings on music associated with the period of Don Quixote. In partnership with Ensemble Fontegara the musicians have presented large-scale Baroque choral compositions by composers outside Spain, among them Schütz, Handel, Bach, Pergolesi, and Monteverdi. A recording of Victoria’s Requiem mass appeared in 2017.