ensemble lipzodes -- past concerts & reviews

Past Concerts
November 9, 2017
Una Tonadilla Nuebla (music from the Ibarra Manuscript in Ecuador)
Latino Music Fest in Chicago, IL
For more information, please click here.

April 6, 2017
O Light of Dawn in Colonial Guatemala
Church of San Juan
For more information, including the program, please click here.

March 21-25, 2015
Celebren la tierra, celebren los cielos
Música del Manscrito de Ibarra (1680-1730)
Festival Internacional de Músico Sacra
Quito, Ecuador

May 22, 2013
Oy Hasemos Fiesta
Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango
Bogota, Colombia

March 19 and 20, 2013
Misa Inclita Stirps Jesse by Philippe Rogier
XII Festival Internacional de Música Sacra
Quito, Ecuador

April 3 - 4, 2012
Missa Ave Virgo Sanctissima
by Géry de Ghersem (c.1572-1630)
Iglesia la Compañia, Quito, Ecuador
Theatro Nacional Sucre, Quito, Ecuador
Masterclass: April 4, 2012 at the Theatro Variedades, Quito, Ecuador

December 18, 2011
Colonial Christmas of the Americas
Oratorio Camerta and Ensemble Lipzodes
Under the direction of Cathedral Hispanic Choir Director, Leonardo Panigada Christ Church Cathedral
125 Monument Circle, Indianapolis, Indiana

September 17, 2011
The Ornament of The World: Music from Muslim, Jewish and Christian Pre-Expulsion Spain
The Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, 30 West 68th Street, New York City

May 6, 2011
Oy Hasemos Fiesta
Music from Guatemala in the 16th and 17th Centuries
Meridionalis and Lipzodes with Sebastian Zubieta
America's Society, New York City http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XINNTIsqWxk

April 21 and 23, 2011
St. Matthew Passion and Tenebrae Responsories (Victoria)
X Festival Internacional Musica Sacra
Quito, Ecuador

April 6, 2010
Oy Hasemos Fiesta
Music from Guatemala in the 16th and 17th Centuries
Lilly Library of Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana

April 3 & 4, 2010
Oy Hasemos Fiesta
Quito Early Music Festival
IX Festival Internacional Musica Sacra
Quito, Ecuador

February 13, 2010
Oy Hasemos Fiesta
Early Music Now
Milwaukee, WI

April 22, 2010
Chicago Early Music Festival, Millenium Park Pavilion
Chicago, IL

April 24, 2009
Call, Court and Casbah: Music of Muslim and Jewish Spain
Grigg Gallery, St. Louis Art Museum
St. Louis, MO

March 13, 2009
Call, Court and Casbah: Music of Muslim and Jewish Spain
Arts Alive at Loyola University
Chicago, IL

January 18, 2009
¡Fiesta Guatemalteca! Music of 16th & 17th c. Guatemala
St. Martin's Church, Providence, RI

July 15 -- August 4, 2008
Ensemble Lipzodes South America Tour
Sao Paulo, Brasilia, Londrina and Juiz de Fora.

May 26, 2008 (??)
BLEMF (Bloomington Early Music Festival)
Temple Beth Shalom, Bloomington, IN

November 26, 2007
Music from 16th century Guatemala
2007 Latino Music Festival
G.A.R Rotunda, Chicago Cultural Center
Chicago, IL

November 14, 2007
Music from Muslim & Jewish Spain
Fowler Hall, Purdue University
Lafayette, Indiana

July 8, 2007
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

June 15, 2007
Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF)
Boston, MA

March 25 - 29, 2007
Ensemble in residence at the University of North Texas
Denton, TX

December 9, 2006
"Novenas in Wind"
Presented as part of the European Sacred Music Concert Series
DeBoest Lecture Hall, Indianapolis Museum of Art

September 10, 2006
Music from 16th century Guatemala
St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church
Albuquerque, NM

18 September 2005
Music from 16th century Guatemala
St. Francis Episcopal Church
Zionsville, IN

June 18, 2005
Music from 16th century Guatemala Boston Early Music Festival BEMF fringe event Church of the Covenant
Boston, MA

Reviews of Ensemble Lipzodes
December 2012
Review of Lipzodes in Diálogos (Spanish)

The entire magazine is available here. Our review is on page 38.

September 2012
Review of our CD in Fanfare Magazine by Henry Lebedinsky

The musicians of Ensemble Lipzodes, performing on shawms, recorders, and dulcians, met while students at Indiana University and work with many of the world's most prestigious historical performance ensembles. Together, they blend serious musicianship with a sense of fun that comes through very clearly on this recording, playing a selection of dance pieces and embellished instrumental versions of sacred polyphonic vocal pieces. Their phrasing is lovely, paying attention to the syntax and rhetoric of each line with a good singer's skill.

You can read the entire review here.

2010
Review of our CD by Johan van Veen

This disc...[is] an important addition to the growing catalogue of recordings with Latin American repertoire. It could also serve to correct, as it were, the picture of music from that continent. Not everything is extraverted, and not all music from that region needs to be performed with a lot of noise. Lovers of Latin-American music shouldn't miss this disc, but others - for instance those who are interested in early liturgical music - will also enjoy this recording.

The full review can be read here.

Summer 2010
Review of Ensemble Lipzodes recent CD, Oy hasemos fiesta (Excerpt)
Johan van Veen (musica dei donum.org)

This disc contains music which almost certainly has been recorded never before. That makes it an important addition to the growing catalogue of recordings with Latin American repertoire. It could also serve to correct, as it were, the picture of music from that continent. Not everything is extraverted, and not all music from that region needs to be performed with a lot of noise. Lovers of Latin-American music shouldn't miss this disc, but others - for instance those who are interested in early liturgical music - will also enjoy this recording. ...The general level of singing and playing by the choir and the ensemble is excellent.

February 14, 2010
Ensemble Lipzodes makes Guatemalan music timeless
By David Lewellen, Special to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Ensemble Lipzodes proved Saturday night that the sources of thought-provoking, breathtaking music must be inexhaustible. The Indiana-based group, appearing under the auspices of Early Music Now, presented a program of music written in Guatemala in the 1500s. The Spanish took their music to their colonies, where the indigenous people adopted it, too. According to program notes, a portion of the anonymous music, from manuscripts now housed at Indiana University, was probably written by Native Americans. The performance at All Saints Cathedral showed that music written in the New World during the early days of colonization sounds similar to what the Old World was producing at the same time, which may be the most remarkable thing of all. Music written for isolated churches in remote mountains in Guatemala has every bit as much passion, energy, and magic as anything the great musical centers of Europe were hearing. How much more is lying undiscovered in some attic anywhere in the world? It's a humbling thought. The six musicians - Juan Carlos Arango and Christa Patton (mostly shawms), Anna Marsh and Kelsey Schilling (mostly dulcians), Yonit Kosovske (organ) and Wolodymyr Smishkewych (singer and percussion) - performed with remarkable ensemble and technique. The performers stood in a semicircle and signaled to one another to let tempos sway and bounce. A few moments of ragged intonation (probably inevitable on the relatively primitive instruments) made the group's typically rock-solid sound all the more notable. The music spanned many styles, from unadorned chant to complex counterpoint among four independent lines. Ensemble Lipzodes invested nearly all of it with an intensity of feeling that was at once grave and exuberant, typical of the best music produced during the Renaissance. Dances whirled; religious texts soared; instrumental lines wound around each other. Only a few repetitive chants written in a narrow range seemed less than completely inspired. The only distinctively New World feature of the program might have been the song performed in the indigenous language of Nahuatl. Smishkewych coached the near-capacity audience to sing the response to his calls, to general enjoyment.
-- Journal Sentinel (Milwaukee, Wisconsin)

February 13, 2010
Review: Early Music Now Presents Ensemble Lipzodes
by Tom Strini, Third Coast Digest

The Spanish came to Guatemala, converted the locals, and were pleased to find a particular talent for music among them. That was news to me, and I was pleased to learn it Sunday afternoon, as Early Music Now presented Ensemble Lipzodes at All Saints. Cathedral. Everyone in the sextet studied at Indiana University. IU is the repository of the rare Guatemalan manuscripts from which they draw their repertoire. The group draws its name from an enigmatic scrawl on the front of one of those manuscripts. The music is almost all sacred and very much in the style of the European Renaissance. I kept waiting for some inflections of Indian music to sneak in, in a scale or the introduction of native instruments. Didn.t happen. If it did back in the day, it wasn.t written down for posterity. Most texts were in Latin and a few were in Spanish, but the manuscripts also show that the choirs occasionally translated the texts into one of the three indigenous languages. Tenor and multi-instrumentalist Wolodymyr Smishkewych handled the solo chants and served as the band.s front man. An ensemble variously comprising recorders, shawms, dulcian, sackbuts, chamber organ and harp handled the part-songs, a very common practice back in the day. Many of the 27 brief numbers had that Spanish 6/8-3/4 metric flair. Smishkewych has a fine, clear tenor and did well to sustain interest in the longer liturgical chants. He is also a charming presence and has a winning way with informative banter. He got the big crowd to sing along lustily with a phrase in native Nahuatl. Some of the polyphonic music was a little tricky to play, but nothing on the program was virtuosic. This was music that native choirmasters and their native choirs and players would have sung and played every day as part of the Catholic liturgy. It is lovely. Except for one out-of-tune recorder solo, Ensemble Lipzodes performed it accurately and simply . even bluntly. Their approach sounded just right.
--Third Coast Digest . Arts& Culture . Music (Milwaukee, Wisconsin)

January, 2006
The Ninth Competition in Performance of Music from Spain and Latin America (2006)

The semifinal and final rounds took place Saturday and Sunday, January 28 and 29, in Auer Hall at Indiana University, Bloomington. The jury was composed of professors Juan Orrego-Salas, Arnaldo Cohen, Otis Murphy, Luiz Fernando Lopes and Carmen Helena Téllez; with guest judge professor Paul Borg from Illinois State University. In the Early Music Category the Grand Prize and Performance Practice Prize were won ex aequo by Ensemble Lipzodes and Ensemble L'Aura. Both ensembles were sponsored by professor Michael McCraw. The winners will receive cash awards, and will record a collective CD with their competition repertoire in the upcoming year.

October 5, 2004
Early Music Enchantment
by Peter Jacobi, Herald Times music critic

The musicians seemed to be ready for their test, managing like conjurers to take a listener back to that other time in another place and making him feel both the reverence and the joy that this music most likely expressed for worshippers who first heard it, native worshippers who were being wooed to Christianity. The lively instrumental introductions and bridges balanced the more serious chanting quality of sung praises and must have made vespers and the mass more comfortable and acceptable experiences for the newcomers in attendance. ..... There was enchantment to their music making, and one sensed also that what one heard was as honest a representation of this music as could be hoped for, considering the sparseness of notation and guidance that such old manuscripts offer. What resulted turned into a most moving experience."
--Herald-Times (Bloomington, Indiana)