For over thirty years Carlos Patiño served Philip IV as Choirmaster in the Spanish Royal Chapel. The Spanish monarch was not the only one who...

For over thirty years Carlos Patiño served Philip IV as Choirmaster in the Spanish Royal Chapel. The Spanish monarch was not the only one who held him in great esteem, for João IV of Portugal admired him as well and put together a collection of his works for the renowned Livraria. In 1634, after Mateo Romero had retired, Patiño became the first non-Franco-Flemish maestro de capilla in the Spanish Hapsburg court. Trained in the cathedral tradition in Seville under the tutelage of Alonso Lobo, he developed his own musical style which combined his interest in counterpoint with the use of multiple choirs. From his extensive corpus of Latin vocal music, widely disseminated throughout the principal ecclesiastic centres of Spain and America, Albert Recasens and La Grande Chapelle have extracted some gems. The selection of pieces, many dedicated to the Virgin Mary, not only manifest the quality and originality of Patiño’s work, but also reveal a fascinating amalgam of compositional procedures which are invariably used to underline the meaning of the words