Festival des Riches Heures de La Réole

Festival des Riches Heures de La Réole
Requiem Real de Sebastián López de Velasco (1628)
Iglesia Saint-Pierre de La Réole (FR)
27 September 2026, 16h

ROYAL REQUIEM
Office and Mass for the Dead for 8 voices by López de Velasco (1584-1659)

This ambitious project was born in Mexico, following the discovery, in the archives of the Cathedral of Puebla, of an incomplete collection that gathered the works of Sebastián López de Velasco.

Beyond Victoria: the missing link of the Spanish Golden Age.

While audiences know and admire the unique Officium Defunctorum by Tomás Luis de Victoria (1605), the history of Iberian sacred music seemed to have kept its secrets for the period that followed. This program fills that historical gap. Sebastián López de Velasco (1584–1659), trained in Segovia and chapel master of the prestigious royal monastery of the Descalzas Reales in Madrid, embodies the ideals of the emerging Baroque music in Spain.

From 12 to 8 voices: the genius of reduction
The heart of this program lies in a dialogue between two masters. Francisco Dávila y Páez had composed, for the needs of the royal convent, a monumental Requiem for 12 voices (triple choir). In 1628, Velasco took up this masterpiece, revised it, and “reduced” it to 8 voices (double choir) in order to enable its wider dissemination. Far from impoverishing the work, this reduction heightens its dramatic tension and introduces into Spain a new genre that would become the standard of Spanish Baroque polychoral music.

A true musicological adventure
It required all the expertise of Vox Cantoris to carry out an unprecedented investigation at the heart of the royal monastery of the Descalzas Reales, a place of power and a pantheon of princesses of royal blood. It was in this sanctuary governed by the rigorous rule of the Poor Clares — who organized even the smallest details of the ceremonies together with
the chapel master — that this music found its meaning. Vox Cantoris undertook a patient work of musicological reconstruction, producing the transcription from the eight separate voice booklets preserved in the National Library of Spain.