A Fiesta’s Serious Business - The Boston Musical Intelligencer
By Estaban Cfrespo
October 8, 2026
As if in pilgrimage, three resolute singers carried a melody down the nave toward the stage to open La Donna Musicale’s concert at the Church of the Covenant last Sunday. Their seamless blend with the ensemble’s five musicians set the tone for a program of love and longing that moved across some five centuries and nearly as many languages. Under the direction of Laury Gutiérrez, the Boston-based group has spent more than a decade fusing early modern and Latin music.
Today’s most successful Latin music has its roots in the Baroque. Much as now, 400 years ago music composed and performed by Spanish speakers captured global taste, and reggaeton, bachata, and salsa still inherit the rich cultures of the Iberian worlds, arguably the first global culture. Sunday’s concert traced that lineage, from nostalgic grieving through a pilgrimage to a celebratory sonic feast. Remarkably well conceived, the program allowed the eight musicians who bring it to life to showcase their exceptionally accomplished art. In the concert’s title, “Latin-Baroque Fiesta,” all was said. Unlike the English word “party,” with its legal and mundane undertones, the Spanish fiesta evinces an old civilizational convergence of the sacred and the joyful. Festus, in Latin, encapsulates that combination of holy and festive. A fiesta is serious business. La Donna Musicale’s concert reminded Boston that Hispanic cultures have practiced this kind of celebration for centuries.
The first song, “Arvoles yoran por yuvias” (The trees cry for the rain), gave voice to the pain of deportation. Mezzo-soprano Daniela Tosic’s warm tones, ringing voice, and impeccably executed melismas summoned a centuries-old nostalgia for Iberia. The deportees yearn to return home and see their sweethearts, yet the knowledge they will “meet death in foreign lands” makes their “heart sigh.” As the rhythm of Marcelo Morales’s talented percussion resounded through the church, the evoked landscape seemed to echo the deportees’ heartbreak: trees and mountains weep while the voices beg for help. One can only imagine the throngs who left Spain in 1492, when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella expelled hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Jews from the peninsula. This song might have been composed then. Written in Ladino, a language derived from Old Spanish which Sephardic Jews carried with them into exile, the song has not lost its urgent relevance four centuries later.
“Before we feast, we’ll first grieve,” explained Gutiérrez referring to the concert’s first part. Indeed, the sorrows of displacement, all too familiar in our own days, reappeared in the following song, “A tierras ajenas” (To Foreign Lands). Paradoxically, its composer worked as singer and chaplain for the same King Ferdinand at the root of the massive expulsions of non-Christians from Iberia. Adriana Ruiz’s velvety high tones intensified the nostalgic melody of Francisco de Peñalosa’s three-voice villancico. Artful, the three singers’ vocal blend resonated as a bigger chorus. Their embellishments gestured towards individuality while cohesively harmonizing.
Tenor Fausto Miro’s rich timbre and dramatic execution soared above the ensemble to give voice to another kind of exile. “Tonada El Congo” laments the torments of enslaved people brought from West Africa to the Americas. This well-known song survives in the eighteenth-century Codex Martínez-Compañón, which gathers it with other compositions and with many watercolors recording the feasts and sorrows of early modern Peru.