Brazilian Baroque, Ex Cathedra, Birmingham Town Hall, review
Jeffrey Skidmore led the Ex Cathedra choir and orchestra in a decent, if rarely dynamic, concert of Baroque music from Brazil, says John Allison
Lost in translation: Music of colonial Brazil was celebrated by the Ex Cathedra Choir and Baroque Orchestra
It’s a long way in every sense from Brazil’s
colonial churches to Birmingham Town Hall, and some things can get lost in
translation.
In the case of this fascinating yet flawed Brazilian Baroque concert by the Ex
Cathedra Choir and Baroque Orchestra (Birmingham’s long-established period
performance ensemble), perhaps the biggest confusion lay in the use of the
word “Baroque”, a term applied these days to music written roughly between
1600 and 1750.
Most of this concert featured music that came later, and indeed the label –
actually derived from the Portuguese word 'barroco', meaning a misshaped
pearl and originally used pejoratively – entered regular currency only in
the 19th century.
But as Ex Cathedra’s artistic director Jeffrey
Skidmore admitted in his programme notes, even allowing for a late
flowering of the Baroque in Brazil, “Colonial” and “Baroque” have long been
confusingly interchangeable in discussion of the country’s musical history.
Very little is known about the music of the Portuguese colonists during their
first two centuries in Brazil, and even less about Portuguese music
elsewhere – tantalisingly little in the case of the chapel of Nossa
Senhora de Baluarte in Mozambique Island, established in 1522 and
the oldest European building in the southern hemisphere.
Skidmore – who has previously explored and recorded Spanish colonial music
from other parts of South and Central America – concentrated his research
for this programme in the churches and libraries on the coastal fringe of
Brazil.
In some cases, the manuscripts preserved here are valuable copies of music destroyed in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and the concert opened with a piece by a composer of Portugal’s polyphonic golden age, Manuel Cardoso, who never set foot in Brazil. Nevertheless, it was good to hear his supplicatory Et tractatu sancti Augustini caught with haunting serenity by the singers of Ex Cathedra.
This programme reflected little of any musical interaction there may have been between missionaries and the native populations, and almost everything was sung in Latin. But a handful of popular villancico-type pieces, thought to be by the Lisbon-based composer António Marques Lésbio, added Portuguese piquancy and were accompanied by guitar (or strummed theorbo) and percussion.
Two substantial Mass settings were threaded through the programme. The Missa a oito vozes e instrumentos by André da Silva Gomes (1752-1844), a Lisbon-born composer who was appointed to São Paulo’s cathedral, gains a certain exuberance from prominent trumpet parts that would hardly be found in equivalent European works, but otherwise it is hardly more adventurous than Salieri on autopilot.
Still, the eight-part fugue in the Kyrie had its moments, and the Quoniam was, unusually, set for two tenors in duet.
Most attractive of all was the music of José Maurício Nunes Garcìa (1767-1830), the Rio-born mixed-race priest whose career flourished after the Portuguese court transferred to Brazil in 1808.
His Requiem, written on the death of Queen Maria I, is considered his masterpiece, but this concert showed that his Missa Pastoril para a noite de Natal is captivating enough. A Christmas Mass, it captures something of the warmth of a southern, sunny celebration, and its mixture of pungency and pastoralism derives from the clarinet parts.
Two other composers proved worth hearing. A handful of simple, devotional pieces by José Joachim Emerico Lobo de Mesquita (1746-1805), who worked in the gold-mining region around Ouro Preto, added guitar to the accompaniments of strings and organ continuo.
As in other performances here, Skidmore’s direction could have been more dynamic. But he did capture the gently swaying beauty of the unaccompanied Oh! pulchra es by Luís Álvares Pinto, composed in 18th-century Recife and one of the earliest examples of Brazil’s colonial music.
In some cases, the manuscripts preserved here are valuable copies of music destroyed in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, and the concert opened with a piece by a composer of Portugal’s polyphonic golden age, Manuel Cardoso, who never set foot in Brazil. Nevertheless, it was good to hear his supplicatory Et tractatu sancti Augustini caught with haunting serenity by the singers of Ex Cathedra.
This programme reflected little of any musical interaction there may have been between missionaries and the native populations, and almost everything was sung in Latin. But a handful of popular villancico-type pieces, thought to be by the Lisbon-based composer António Marques Lésbio, added Portuguese piquancy and were accompanied by guitar (or strummed theorbo) and percussion.
Two substantial Mass settings were threaded through the programme. The Missa a oito vozes e instrumentos by André da Silva Gomes (1752-1844), a Lisbon-born composer who was appointed to São Paulo’s cathedral, gains a certain exuberance from prominent trumpet parts that would hardly be found in equivalent European works, but otherwise it is hardly more adventurous than Salieri on autopilot.
Still, the eight-part fugue in the Kyrie had its moments, and the Quoniam was, unusually, set for two tenors in duet.
Most attractive of all was the music of José Maurício Nunes Garcìa (1767-1830), the Rio-born mixed-race priest whose career flourished after the Portuguese court transferred to Brazil in 1808.
His Requiem, written on the death of Queen Maria I, is considered his masterpiece, but this concert showed that his Missa Pastoril para a noite de Natal is captivating enough. A Christmas Mass, it captures something of the warmth of a southern, sunny celebration, and its mixture of pungency and pastoralism derives from the clarinet parts.
Two other composers proved worth hearing. A handful of simple, devotional pieces by José Joachim Emerico Lobo de Mesquita (1746-1805), who worked in the gold-mining region around Ouro Preto, added guitar to the accompaniments of strings and organ continuo.
As in other performances here, Skidmore’s direction could have been more dynamic. But he did capture the gently swaying beauty of the unaccompanied Oh! pulchra es by Luís Álvares Pinto, composed in 18th-century Recife and one of the earliest examples of Brazil’s colonial music.
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