TENEBRAE’S ‘pilgrimage tour’ - 8.03.06

Each year, considerably more than 50,000 people from all over the world arrive on foot, blistered and fatigued, in the small Galician city of Santiago di Compostella, at the conclusion of a long and arduous journey across northern Spain. Many are making a gesture of faith in the manner of their Catholic forefathers, who in the early centuries of the last millennium travelled in their hundreds-of-thousands each year in search of atonement and healing at the shrine of St James in Santiago. But an increasing number today are making the journey for personal reasons. The ‘camino’, as it is known in Spain, often marks a turning point in the life of the pilgrim. He or she may be recovering from a period of personal crisis or loss, or searching for something: a sense of spirituality, a feeling of peace, or a burst of motivation. Somehow, the road to Santiago provides all of this through its shared hardship, its miraculous beauty and its lasting companionship.

In July Tenebrae will make a symbolic concert tour/pilgrimage from Burgos to Ponferrada, giving 6 concerts along the route. There are thousands of churches, chapels, monasteries and cathedrals on the Camino Frances, the most well trodden pilgrimage route across northern Spain towards Santiago di Compostella. The beautiful locations for Tenebrae’s pilgimage concerts will be the Inglesia de San Nicolas in San Juan de Ortega, Inglesia de la Merced in Burgos, Santa Maria del Castillo in Fromista, The Monasterio de San Zoilo at Carrion de los Condes, the Catedral de Leon, finishing at the Inglesia de Nuestra Senora de la Encina in Ponferrada (see diary for more precise details).

There will be two different programmes of music performed along the tour one including the Lamentations of Padilla and Victoria’s Tenebrae Responories. The other programme will be the specially commissioned ‘Path of Miracles’ written by Joby Talbot.

“Having heard Nigel Short’s ideas for a new piece about the medieval pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella I was taken to a Tenebrae recording session at the Temple Church where I was utterly bowled over by the sheer beauty of the sound of this unique choir. A trip to northern Spain with my wife & one year old son Maurice followed & over ten magical days we visited many of the important points of the Camino including four of its greatest churches: the abbey at Roncesvalles in the foothills of the Pyrenees and the great cathedrals of Burgos, Leon & Santiago itself. The impressions these places left on me became the basis for the musical structure of the work.” Joby Talbot

‘Joby Talbot’s ambitious a cappella Path of Miracles is little short of a musical miracle itself’. Nick Breckenfield