Cardoso: Requiem

The Portuguese school of Renaissance composers is only just beginning to be explored. It came to maturity relatively slowly, and when it finally did, in the first half of the seventeenth century, much of the rest of Europe had moved on to a new musical world. Only countries on the edge of the continent – especially England, Poland and Portugal – continued as late as 1650 to give employment to composers who found creative possibilities in unaccompanied choral music. Even so, very few of these composers remained completely untouched by the experiments of Monteverdi and the new Italian Baroque school, so that their music became a fascinating hybrid, looking forward and back, often unexpectedly introducing twists and turns to what otherwise might be taken for pure ‘Palestrina’.

Even though Portuguese composer Manuel Cardoso lived well into the early Baroque era, his music was informed by the older Renaissance polyphony of Palestrina, and despite the dramatic stylistic changes that developed elsewhere in Europe, his works remained rather conservative and representative of the church music of the Counter-Reformation. Like his older Spanish contemporary Tomás Luis de Victoria, Cardoso's best-known work is his Requiem (Missa pro defunctis a 4), which is perhaps the most frequently performed of his surviving compositions, which were published in five volumes in Lisbon between 1613 and 1648.

Lôbo & Cardoso - Portuguese Requiem Masses - Schola Cantorum of Oxford, Jeremy Summerly (1992) {Naxos 8.550682}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 210 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 121 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (jpg) -> 10 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1992 HNH Int. / Naxos | 8.550682
Classical / Renaissance / Baroque / Choral / Sacred / Masses

Jeremy Summerly and his Oxford Schola Cantorum is beautifully paced and the calibre of the singing itself is very impressive indeed, as is the Naxos recording. …the singing is unique: forthright, direct, fresh, recorded quite ‘tight’ and making this 17th-century music as emotive as possible.