Luis de Narváez, Pablo Márquez

Musica del Delphin is a selection of seventeen pieces from Luys de Narváez's Los seys libros del Delphin, the vihuela book printed in Valladolid in 1538. Pablo Márquez plays them on the modern guitar. It was the Argentine guitarist's first album on ECM New Series. His stated aim is to show that this Renaissance music can be played convincingly without the original vihuela, provided the player understands its grammar.

Márquez came to Europe to study Renaissance repertoire and the period treatises on performance practice, and Narváez stayed with him through his career. He also works in contemporary music, with groups such as the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and studied Argentine traditional music with his mentor Dino Saluzzi. It was through Saluzzi that Manfred Eicher met him and offered him this project. The album was recorded in April 2006 at the Kulturbühne AmBach in Götzis, Austria, with Markus Heiland as engineer and Eicher producing.

Narváez, born in Granada around 1500, lived in the age of Josquin Desprez and Nicolas Gombert, served the future Philip II and was famed for improvising complex polyphony. His Seys libros hold fantasias, intabulations of vocal works and two groups of diferencias, the first printed sets of variations in European music. Márquez includes all eight fantasias on the modes from the first book, rarely part of the guitar repertoire, and threads sacred and popular pieces between them. Among these are the Canción del Emperador on Josquin's Mille regretz and the variations on Conde Claros and the hymn O gloriosa Domina. He takes faster tempi than usual, so that ornament stays light and the vocal lines remain audible.

Writing in Gramophone, William Yeoman praised "a sweetness of tone that recalls the use of the flesh against gut courses" and noted that Márquez does not try to imitate the vihuela. Stewart McCoy of Early Music Review singled out his intabulation of Jean Richafort's Je veulx laysser melancolie, played "with suitable panache", and the Quarto tono. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Reinhard J. Brembeck found the playing wonderfully calm and steeped in beautiful colours. Tyran Grillo of ECM Reviews singled out the O gloriosa Domina variations in 2012.

This is the CD edition, ECM New Series 1958, released on 15 May 2007, with a performer's note by Márquez and an essay by Thierry Rougier.