Christina Pluhar / L’Arpeggiata
Céline Scheen, Luciana Mancini, Vincenzo Capezzuto, Manuel A. Sanchez
Erato
Christina Pluhar continues to be one of the most persuasive and, frankly, funky musical chameleons of the current moment. While she may not be the first to take a voyage from Spain through South America the level of fluency in this release is quite breathtaking. Named after a 12-sided watchtower (a regular dodecagon if you prefer) near Seville which once overlooked the Spanish Galleons as they set sale for ‘the New World’ and returned with plundered treasures, musical or otherwise; this is the same musical exchange that once captivated David Munrow who, travelling to Peru in the early 60s was entranced by similarities between instruments of the European Renaissance and modern folk instruments. Like Munrow, Andrew Lawrence-King (especially La Púrpura de la Rosa 07/99) and many others, Pluhar has created an album infused with a range of sounds from bright harpists and brushed percussion to the urgency of the maracas, and the dazzling fluency of the guitarists that feeds directly back into her baroque specialism. All work together to create the crowd-pleasing musical mischief that we have come to love from L’Arpeggiata.
To read the full text of this review please visit Gramophone.co.uk (June 2026)
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