Criticultura em Portugal

My first real exposure to high quality Renaissance music was via Tallis Scholars recordings, back in the 1980s when they were a relatively new group. Remarkably, the founder of the group, Peter Phillips, is still leading them over 50 years after their founding. Based on the performance I saw last week in Belém, there has been remarkably little change in the group's sonic or interpretive stance over that timespan. Depending on your perspective, that is either comforting or disappointing. Count me in the latter group (I know, what a surprise). Over recent decades, new groups performing the core Renaissance repertory have sprung up and have communicated new interpretive and sonic ideas. You would never know this from last week's performance. Phillips' interpretive view is seemingly etched in granite. High quality granite, to be sure, but still granite. Back in the 1970s and 80s, recordings of Renaissance music were unusual. Phillips started the Tallis Scholars in 1973, when he...

Recently, I saw the forces of the São Carlos Opera perform the rarely-done  Scenes from Goethe's Faust  by Robert Schumann. I got oddly nostalgic. It was good to finally hear this work, since I remember discussing it in my term paper for an Opera course in college (my discussion was rather abstract, since Pomona college had no recording of the work). My paper addressed Romantic treatments of Goethe's famed  Faust , probably the most revered and influential play of the era. It's a strange rambling play, rarely seen outside of Germany. Alongside the familiar story of Faust selling his soul to the devil, there are spirits, demons,  a charming and intelligent devil (Mephistopheles), and an uber-victimized woman (Gretchen) who strangles her illegitimate child, but is redeemed in the end. The big theme of Faust's rejecting traditional religion, falling into depravity, then being resurrected via his curiosity and creative spirit resonated with the romantics, for whom "...

Last week I had the rare opportunity to see Benjamin Britten's War Requiem  (1961) done by the orchestra and chorus of the Lisbon São Carlos Opera. It is a fine piece, and is not done often because of the large forces required: big orchestra, chorus, chamber orchestra (12-13 players), children's chorus with organ, and 3 vocal soloists. The São Carlos musicians are doing very big complex pieces this year at various sites around the country, since they are unable to use their under-renovation opera house. As a result Lisbon music lovers are reaping the benefits in hearing some big rare pieces like this one and a well-played Mahler Eighth Symphony last fall. This performance was well conducted by Graeme Jenkins, with Portuguese soloists Silvia Sequeira, Marco Alves dos Santos, and André Baleiro, all of whom sang with excellent English diction. The company provided an excellent program book with full texts and translations (into Portuguese), along with projected Portuguese supratit...

In Portugal holiday music is not necessarily linked to the English-German-US canon of Messiah  and caroling. Most professional performing organizations do a big concert, but the pieces performed are usually not from a uniform playbook related to Christmas. Of course, local community choirs are heard around town performing Portuguese (and other) Christmas songs, and caroling occurs, if not as much as in the US and UK.  Over the recent holiday period I heard two choral and one orchestral concert around Lisbon. The best of these was the New Year's Eve concert of the Gulbenkian Choir, founded in 1964 and usually considered the best professional chorus in the area. This year's concert was entertaining and well performed, and was held in the wonderfully ornate Church of São Roque, the earliest extant Jesuit church in Portugal (late 17th century). This is one of the few churches to survive the massive 1755 earthquake and pairs a gaudy Baroque interior with a plain rectangular archite...

 I recently saw a play ( Our Town  on Broadway) and a film ( Challengers ) that made me think about how narrative sequence plays into dramatic urgency and character development.  Thornton Wilder's Our Town  won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1938, along with wide admiration for its stripped-down, innovative "modern" structure (e.g. Edward Albee called it the greatest American play). I mostly know it as a vehicle for high school and community theater, perhaps because of its immediacy, simple prose, and many characters, offering community troupes lots of participation. Oddly, this lauded Broadway production was my first exposure to it. The play depicts the life (from childhood to death) of members of the town of Grover's Corners New Hampshire. His three acts (Daily Life, Lover and  Marriage, Death and Eternity) do not mess with time sequence, and lay out a very linear chronology, mostly following on the young couple Emily and George. We see a series of snapshots ...