FROM GUEST CURATOR SEBASTIÁN ZUBIETA

Also from the Bolivian missions, and this time performed by Bolivian musicians, this video of Domenico Zipoli’s Te Deum laudamus was performed by Arakaendar Bolivia, led by British conductor Ashley Solomon, during a blizzard in March 2015. I had heard Solomon’s first CD of music from the Jesuit Missions with his ensemble Florilegium soon after it was released 15 years ago. Subsequent projects with the repertoire are a testament to his commitment to the musical growth of the region with the creation of Arakaendar Bolivia. This group of young musicians from the Bolivian East worked with Ashley several times a year and regularly recorded and toured internationally, creating beautiful music and disseminating it over the world. This video is from the ensemble’s US debut tour. Composer Domenico Zipoli was born in the Tuscan city of Prato in 1688, where he had his early musical training. After organ studies in Florence with Giovani Maria Casini and in Naples with Alessandro Scarlatti, he settled in Rome in the early 1710s. Two of his oratorios date to this period: San Antonio di Padova (1712) and Santa Caterina, Virgine e martire (1714). Around 1715 he became the organist of the Church of the Gesù, the mother church of the Society of Jesus, and completed his best-known work, a collection of keyboard pieces titled Sonate d'intavolatura per organo e cimbalo, published in 1716. At this point, Zipoli seems to have vanished, and it was only during the 20th century that his presence in South America was proposed (1941) and demonstrated (1962) by Uruguayan musicologist Lauro Ayestarán. We now know that in 1716 Zipoli traveled to Seville, where he joined the Jesuits, and left Spain with a group of missionaries who reached Buenos Aires on July 13, 1717. He completed his religious studies in Córdoba (present-day Argentina), where he was music director at the Jesuit church and where he died in 1726. His works spread quickly throughout the region’s missions and they are especially abundant in the archives of the Bolivian archives, which include two Masses (both without Agnus Dei movements), psalm settings, hymns, this Te Deum laudamus, and other pieces.

– Sebastiáno Zubieta, Music Director, Americas Society