Cunha

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.

These three compositions by three Portuguese composers pay direct and indirect tribute to the music of Beethoven. The Piano Quintet by João Domingos Bomtempo was written in the style of the Viennese Classical mainstream even as Beethoven was changing its direction. The two works by César Viana and Jaime Reis both have distant roots in Beethoven but pay their homage in very different styles, one using relatively traditional language and the other more radical – as was Beethoven himself, of course.