You don’t often hear music from Portugal and former Portuguese colony Brasil. It’s mostly specialists who focus on this music. During this episode we will listen to 18th and 19th century music with a Portuguese ambience.
The first composer is Italian Giovanni Giorgi, who was a chapel master at the San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome during the beginning of the 18th century. In 1725, he moved to Lisbon to became a chapel master at court. He was one of the many Italian composers who settled in Portugal during the 18th century and contributed to giving the music scene there an increasingly Italian flavour.
Giorgi brought with him the tradition of polychoral music from Rome. An example of this is ‘Missa a due Cori in tutti piena‘. It is a work in the ‘stile antico‘, without solo parts and instruments. However, the conductor of the recording we are about to hear decided to add instruments, to reinforce the vocal parts and also perform several passages instrumentally.
The second composer is a Portuguese composer with a fitting name: Marcos Portugal.
He was chapel master at the court and a composer of theatre music. In 1811, he settled in Rio de Janeiro, where the royal family had taken refuge in 1807 when Napoleon occupied Lisbon. In Rio Portugal composed for the court again; we will listen to the Vespers Psalms which he composed around the year 1824.
Giovanni Giorgi (?-1762)
1. Missa a due Cori tutti piena
Choeur de Chambre de Namur, Clematis conducted by Leonardo García Alarcón
(cd: “Ave Maria” – Ricercar RIC 313, 2011)
Marcos Portugal (1762-1830)
From Vésperas, Nossa Senhora in C
2. Sonate in G
3. Dixit Dominus
4. Laudate pueri
5. Laetatus sum
6. Nisi Dominus
7. Lauda Jerusalem
Ensemble Turicum conducted by Mathias Weibel and Luiz Alvares da Silva
(cd: “Vésperas de Nossa Senhora in C major, Missa a quattro in F major” – Toccata Classics TOCC 0238, 2014)
additionally:
Marcos Portugal
8. Fantasia in E-flat
Ensemble Turicum conducted by Mathias Weibel and Luiz Alvares da Silva
(cd: see 2-7)
Pictured: Giovanni Giorgi (caricature from 1719)
