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For over six years, the Grammy Award-winning Kansas City Chorale has explored music inspired by Marco Polo’s 13th century journey from Italy to China. They’ve now compiled that repertoire into a new album, “The Mirage Calls,” released this month, which includes the world premiere recording of a Mass by Bartolomé de Escobedo, not heard in nearly 500 years.
“It all started with the discovery of the Mass by Escobedo,” says Charles Bruffy, Kansas City Chorale’s artistic director and conductor, “and we had done several Chinese folk songs and we started thinking: what do those pieces have in common?”
The connection, they realized, was Marco Polo’s travels along the trade route known as the Silk Road.
The album includes a diverse collection of works, stretching from Europe to the Middle East, through Mongolia to China.
The centerpiece of the album is a 16th century Mass by Escobedo, reconstructed by Kansas-based musicologist Patrick Dittamo.
“Patrick discovered the piece in the Vatican archives and realized it had never been sung in 500 years,” says Bruffy. “He rewrote the sections that had been rotted or chewed away by mice.”
“Missa ad te levavi” exists in only one record, a manuscript copied out around 1540 by the Vatican’s official scribe. It’s in poor condition, written with oak gall ink (derived from the ball-like growths created by wasp infestation), a highly acidic substance that corroded the paper.
“Centuries of storage without humidity or temperature control has led to a great deal of ink bleeding,” Dittamo says.
Fortunately, the Vatican Library had digitized its music manuscripts and made those images available on the internet for study. But despite technological advancements, reconstructing the score was a painstaking process, which took Dittamo about six months to complete.
Kansas City audiences were the first to hear Escobedo’s work outside of the Sistine Chapel when Dittamo’s score was premiered by the Kansas City Chorale in 2019.
Back in 2019, Bruffy felt like an archeologist.
“We get to share a piece of human history,” says Bruffy, “connecting the sounds of the Sistine Chapel from half-a-millennium ago with the modern age.”
Also on the new album are works based on Sufi Muslim tradition (“Zikr”) and Mongolian folk song (“Dörven Dalai”), as well as Se Enkhbayar’s 1992 “Zeregleent Gobi” (Mirage on the Gobi Desert), which inspired the album’s title.
Many of the tracks are based on folk traditions, including three contributions from the award-winning Kansas City-based composer Chen Yi.
Each of the three pieces by Chen are in a different Chinese dialect and she worked with the choristers to help with inflection. “It's lovely to hear their different tonal colors and their skills with the language,” said Bruffy. “There are some [vocal] techniques, especially in the Chinese pieces, that we don't ordinarily use here in the U.S.”
“I think people will be impressed with the different colors and uses of the voice, the different rhythms from the different nations, and the different time periods,” says Bruffy.
The Chorale recorded at Our Lady of Sorrows in Kansas City, with Grammy Award-winning producer Blanton Alspaugh, of Boston-based Soundmirror. Alspaugh has worked with the Chorale on all of its albums.
This album joins Kansas City Chorale’s impressive roster, which includes Grammy Award-winning albums in 2007, 2012 and 2015.
The Kansas City Chorale releases “The Mirage Calls” on April 11, 2025. For more information visit kcchorale.org.
