Heu

Une histoire de la cathédrale de Notre-Dame de Paris. L'auteure souligne la gloire qui l'entoure et les symboles qu'elle représente. Depuis des siècles, ce monument classé au patrimoine mondial de l'Unesco inspire les écrivains, mais également le respect. …

Vicente Lusitano’s earliest biographer, writing two centuries after his death around 1561, omitted to mention that the composer’s mother was most likely a Black African enslaved by Portuguese colonialists. Choral ensemble The Marian Consort and its unflappable director, Rory McCleery, dive deep into the sacred motets of Lusitano’s Liber primus epigramatum, the first-ever publication of works by a Black composer. Their choice of 10 pieces reveals the striking breadth of invention, subtle textures and harmonies, and sheer beauty of his music, with each of those qualities present in full measure in the sublime Emendemus in melius (Track 7) and Sancta mater, istud agas (Track 9). There’s room, too, for the meandering melodies of Heu me, Domine (Track 6), with its startling chromatic lines, and Inviolata, integra et casta es (Track 10) for eight voices, a consummate magnum opus of Renaissance polyphony.

Cancoes, vilancicos e motetes portugueses, séculos XVI-XVII, performed by the Huelgas Ensemble under Paul van Nevel, is one of the recordings issued to mark Lisbon's status as European Cultural Capital in 1994. It concentrates on more varied aspects of Portuguese music than does the Ars Nova recording; first, the majority of the works included, whether sacred or secular, have vernacular texts (Spanish and Portuguese); second, the composers mostly represent the diaspora of Portuguese musicians within Spain, other parts of Europe, and the New World.