Glory of the Wind Band: Music from Portugal & Spain

Streaming online May 24 – June 6

Piffaro, the Renaissance Band’s season finale, recorded live in concert on May 12, 2024 at the historic Wilmington, DE church, Immanuel Highlands, will stream online May 24 – June 6. The program pays homage to the ministriles of Iberia: selections from Lerma, Toledo, Coimbra, Lisbon, Évora, Zaragoza and Seville provide a sense of the scope and variety of music available to to the wind bands of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Glorious music by the biggest names of the era (Francisco Guerrero, Cristóbal de Morales) will be played alongside some of the few surviving works by Portuguese masters (Manuel Mendes, Melchor Robledo) – and many in between.

Piffaro’s band is expanded by wind players Georgeanne Banker, Héloïse Degrugillier, Sian Ricketts, and Kelsey Schilling to feature the ensemble’s vast instrumentarium: shawms, recorders, dulcians, bagpipe, slide trumpets, vihuela, guitar, sackbut, krumhorn, hurdy gurdy, and percussion.

“Intricately programmed, the concert included more than 30 works, some adapted by Grant Herreid, that brought the Iberian Renaissance musically to life. It’s sobering to consider how much music from that time has been lost, but fortunately, groups like Piffaro continue to seek it out.”

Gail Obenreder for Broad Street Review