With “Glosas de oro”, the young early music ensemble Barbaroco breathes new life into the Spanish Renaissance cancioneros and reinvents them with a freedom that makes this repertoire resonate in the present. 
By Juliette Porcher
Barbaroco is a curious name. A portmanteau that evokes at once “baroque,” “rock,” and “barbarian,” in the sense of “foreign.” Isn’t early music itself a kind of foreigner in its own country? Often seen as a fully fledged aesthetic in its own right, it is nevertheless the source of all our cultivated, popular, and contemporary musics. It is to this musical polysemy that the early music ensemble Barbaroco seems to respond. Just listen to its members and you find an astonishing familiarity with this music, an incredible closeness to its harmonies, rhythms, and colours.
The Birth of a Name
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