Edson Luiz da Silva Preço

In Minas Gerais, a region which still enjoyed great opulence in the late eighteenth century thanks to the discovery of gold there, Antonio dos Santos Cunha practised a vivid style of composition, with all the hallmarks of Baroque rhetoric combined with musical resources deriving from Italian opera, and spiced with a tropical ‘Sturm und Drang’, thus adding his own dramatic and intense setting to the canon of Passion music.

The Portuguese-Brazilian composer Marcos António Portugal (1762-1830) was best known in his day for his fifty or so operas, but he also composed a huge body of more than 160 religious choral works. The two here — in their first performances in modern times — illustrate his conservative Classical style as well as the operatic influences on his sacred music, but the absence of female voices from the chorus and violins from the orchestra bring an unexpectedly dark colour.