Confessing to a thirty-year love affair with the music of Mexico, Scottish tenor Jamie MacDougall enthusiastically joins forces with Delphian regulars Mr McFall’s Chamber, whose involvement in Latin American music goes back nearly as far.
The resulting album of songs and chamber music covers the whole of the twentieth century, charting a journey through nationalist, modernist, folk and Aztec influences to the work of Arturo Márquez and Javier Álvarez, two of the most prominent and successful composers in Mexico today.
At the heart of the programme are the classic songs whose writers grew up in the drawing-room culture as well as the bars and brothels of turn-of-the-century Mexico, a repertoire MacDougall reckons the equal of the American Songbook, that should be much better known and more widely heard.
