Luis Dalvan

Filipe de Magalhães was perhaps the most celebrated Portuguese composer of his day. Idiomatic performances from Cupertinos—‘true ambassadors of Portuguese polyphony’—will go a long way towards justifying that reputation to a modern audience.

This album contains a collection of works from the Seicento, most of them well known and recorded several times, although it also includes a composition (Cazzati’s La Verità sprezzata) that is little or not very often heard. It is a repertoire to which we have usually devoted ourselves. That is why we wanted to propose our own way of doing it, in all honesty and avoiding fashions and artifice, without pretentiousness, respecting only the rhetorical —and dramatic— discourse implicit in the texts and their setting to music, fleeing from affectation —but not from affetti— and unquestioned customs, taking advantage of the information provided by musicological research, making use of our intuition and experience, and also remembering the teaching we have received from our old masters. Inspired by Ripa’s allegory and by the idea of truth as άλήθεια or unveiling of the self that is hidden by the veil of appearance, we have endowed our performance with a certain natural simplicity, a deliberate nakedness, especially in moments of particular emotional intensity.

Born in Lisbon of Italian parentage, Pedro António Avondano was employed at the court of Joseph I, becoming Portugal’s leading composer of instrumental music and dances for the royal ballet. Il mondo della luna (‘The World on the Moon’) was a hugely successful libretto by Carlo Goldoni and was set by the likes of Haydn—its comic tale seeing the social climber and strict moralist Buona Fede duped into thinking that he is on the moon. This narrative of illusion in collision with love, jealousy and power struggles is set with sublime lyrical and dramatic transparency by Avondano in this, his only opera.

"Despacito" has been a viral musical phenomenon that has not stopped playing across the world. Shortly after it's release, this contagious song set off unprecedented success: it was the first song sung in Spanish to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in more than 21 years; it also became the most watched video in YouTube's history, with more than three billion views; on Spotify, it has four million daily streams, and already has 1.2 billion streams since it came out.