Joan Baptista (Juan Bautista) Comes - Lamentationes Jeremiæ Prophetæ - Victoria Musicae

Juan Bautista - or Joan Baptista in Catalan - Comes was born around 1582 in Valencia and is considered among the greatest Catalan composers. His talents were recognized beyound his province borders also and in 1618 he was appointed a vicemaestro of the royal chapel in Madrid. However, unlike many an ambitious musuician he didn't appreciate the life in the capital and hankered to return to his home town - which he eventually did. Valencia repaid for his loyalty with money and honours.
The Lamentations of Jeremiah presented here sound very much in vein of the early baroque - that transitional Monteverdi-style which seemed to linger longer in Spain than it did in Italy - and France which leapt from Renaissance polyphony almost straight to its beloved grand motet. Personally I'm very partial to it - it retains all the spirituality and therapeutic harmony of the Renaissance polyphony while being easier to understand for our major-minor trained ear.
Below the cut is the Grove dictionary article on the composer.
download

(b Valencia, c1582; d Valencia, 5 Jan 1643). Spanish composer. He was one of five children of Gaspar Comes, a clog maker, and Hieronyma Villafranca. Juan Bautista was a choirboy at Valencia Cathedral from 1594 until 1 August 1596. He possibly worked as organist and choirmaster in Sueca (Valencia) in 1602 and was employed at Lérida Cathedral between 1605 and 1608 as a singer and later as maestro de capilla. He returned to Valencia in 1608 as vicemaestro de capilla at the Real Colegio del Corpus Christi (Patriarca), and on 20 April 1613 was appointed maestro de capilla at Valencia Cathedral. Comes was ordained as prior on 15 May 1615 and three years later he was appointed vicemaestro of the royal chapel, Madrid. His extant letters suggest that he missed life in Valencia and payment records indicate that he was absent from the royal chapel three times between 1622 and 1626, for periods ranging from several months to over a year and a half. Notwithstanding the additional ‘plaza de Borgoña’ awarded him by the court, he returned permanently to Valencia as maestro de capilla at the Patriarca on 29 June 1628, and was re-engaged as maestro by Valencia Cathedral on 16 October 1632. In 1638 he was relieved of duties relating to the choirboys while retaining his full salary, and the authorities continued to pay for medical treatment and other personal expenses, even reimbursing his heirs some 400 libras (minus the value of certain loans) for compositions he bequeathed to the cathedral on his death. He was buried in the priests’ pantheon in Valencia Cathedral.
About 215 compositions by Comes survive, many of which are for two to four choirs. His oft-cited 17-part Dixit Dominus contains instrumental indications, while other works include the names of the solo singers for each part in three of the four choirs. The reworking he did of Jan Nasco’s St Matthew Passion adds or subtracts parts or sections to reflect the number of persons in the narrative. His stile antico Misa ‘Exsultet caelum’ contains surprising harmonic passages, while his two parody masses, Iste confessor and Ad instar praelii constructa (both with continuo), use masses (not motets) as their models, namely Palestrina’s Missa ‘Iste confessor’ and Victoria’s Missa pro victoria respectively. Nearly half of Comes’s extant works are settings of devotional Spanish texts as villancicos or tonadas. These have sections for solo voice(s) and chorus and use folklike and serious musical styles in an unusual three-part structure.