Al Combate

AL COMBATE, the debut release from the Chicago Arts Orchestra (Javier José Mendoza, Artistic Director), highlights New Spain as a mecca of baroque and galant music through a handpicked selection of works from two of eighteenth-century colonial Mexico’s most prolific and influential composers, whose music explores the period’s transatlantic cultural flow from Europe to New Spain: Ignacio Jerusalem, a master of the galant style who brought modern European styles and techniques across the Atlantic; and Santiago Billoni, whose harmonic experimentation and erudite voice helped shape late baroque repertoire.

The album’s title piece, Al Combate, is the premiere recording of one of the most significant works written in the eighteenth-century Americas. A piece rich in history, it represents a celebratory ode in honor of King Charles III, the single largest piece of secular music known to survive from eighteenth-century New Spain, and a paradigm of the galant style that proliferated in eighteenth-century New Spain.