What I love about the San Francisco Bach Choir's Tesoros Dorados concert by Lezak Shallat published on 2022-10-15T22:24:07Z I'm a singer in the San Francisco Bach Choir. Our director Magen Solomon asked me to comment on our Tesoros Dorados concert because I've had the good fortune to visit some of the churches where this music was written, then lost, then rediscovered, and now restored. I lived in Latin America for many decades, and there was never a time there that I was not singing in a choir -- or two. Works from the cathedrals and chapels of what had been the Spanish colonies in the Americas were becoming a staple of Latin American choral repertory. I recently read a comment by a scholar that "it can be tempting to think of Latin America Baroque music as something recently rediscovered, an exotic add-on to the story of 'Western' music. But it is nothing of the sort. A Bolivian orchestra playing the music of Domenico Zipoli in the heart of the jungle is part of the same tradition as English choral societies singing Messiah." The eastern part of Bolivia known as the Chiquitania is awash with the sounds of Zipoli, who is always a featured composer of the biannual music festival held there, and whose works are part of our program. I attended the festival in 2008 and I had the opportunity to interview Father Piotr Nawrot, a Polish priest and musicologist who was living there. He had already painstakingly restored 27 volumes -- and counting -- of music composed by European priests and their Indian acolytes, and played on instruments that they built themselves. The manuscripts had been left behind in dust bins and church balconies when the Jesuits were expelled by the Spanish crown in 1767. Others were in the possession of ordinary people who had safeguarded them in boxes in their homes. Here's what Nawrot told me that people would tell him: "Father, if this is lost — if it dies, this tradition — we are all lost. We will die together with this manuscript. You see, this music was not just music, it was sacred music." I guess that's what you'd expect a priest to say, no? For me, I love the fact that this music has a home-grown, American history. We sing hymns in Nahuatl and processionals in Quechua to Diospamaman. We sing a saucy invitation to a divine husband from a cloistered nun who was the first Latin American feminist. There's nothing in this music to suggest that terrible things were happening outside the cloister walls -- things like cultural erasure, subjugation, and the rest. This music was written to evangelize, but it is the same music that convinced the colonizing Europeans that the "Indians" in their power were not animals, as professed -- but human... and divinely inspired. That's what I love about our Tesoros Dorados concert. Genre Classical