Толедо

Toledo hangs three civilisations on one rock above the Tajo. The imperial city of Castile kept its synagogues (Santa María la Blanca's white horseshoe forest, the Tránsito's stucco), its mosque-turned-chapel of Cristo de la Luz, and its vast Gothic cathedral — whose Transparente carves a Baroque hole through the ambulatory vault to let heaven light the tabernacle — in a street plan still legibly Moorish: the "city of three cultures" is the textbook phrase, and for once the textbook is right. El Greco made the skyline his signature; his View of Toledo and the Burial of the Count of Orgaz (in situ at Santo Tomé) fixed the city's storm-lit image for the world. Steel made the other reputation: Toledo blades armed centuries of duels, and the damascene gold-on-black craft still glitters in the workshops.

The concert record documents a matched pair: the Monasterio de San Juan de los Reyes — the Catholic Monarchs' florid Gothic foundation, the chains of Christians freed from Granada hanging on its facade, its cloister among Spain's loveliest — and the Teatro de Rojas, the plush nineteenth-century municipal theatre named for the Toledan playwright, where the touring seasons play. Corpus Christi carpets the streets in thyme beneath the great monstrance. Three faiths, one rock, a river in a loop: Toledo is Spain's memory palace.