Holiday Music in Portugal

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 architectural plan. The latter is great for choral music, as the shoebox configuration, without unduly high ceilings, allows for good clarity along with excellent projection. The fabulous painted ceiling included a fake painted dome (picture below), allowing the illusion of cathedral-like space while maintaining the shoebox acoustics. 

 The Gulbenkian Choir sounded great in this space. The 32 voices were well balanced, very in tune, and resonant with little vibrato, all qualities needed for this concert of 20-21st C sacred music of Poulenc, Frank Martin, Barber, and Miguel Jesus (b. 1984). I particularly enjoyed the Swiss composer Martin (1890-1974) Mass for Double Choir, which paired gentle 20th C. harmony with older sacred devices, eg antiphonal chordal echoes from the two choirs that evoked Praetorius from the 17th century. Conductor Inês Tavares Lopes directed very musically and used the church spaces to good advantage, including having the choir sing the Poulenc motets from the back balcony. The audience, oddly, did not applaud for any of the pieces until the end of the concert, defying the usual hyper-applause characteristic of Portugal. Perhaps they were confused because the concert was in a church, but it made for awkward pauses after the various sets. This concert was a great pairing of excellent singing, thoughtful programming, and effective use of space. 

The latter cannot be said for the performance of the Lully Te Deum by the Portuguese ensemble Divino Sospiro and the Nova Era Vocal Ensemble. I have never much cared for the big pieces by Jean Baptiste Lully (1632-1687, shown below), the famed and rich Versailles court composer of Louis XIV. 

His choral music is marked by blocklike, static choral passages alternating with intervening hyper-ornamented music for solo voices and some instruments. This often comes across as music for a pageant rather than a through-composed composition, and perhaps that was the point at Versailles. I think the later French Baroque composers Rameau and Charpentier, not to mention Handel, did this royal music better. Unlike contemporary German composers, vocal counterpoint is nearly absent. 

In this performance I was initially excited by an effective brass fanfare that accompanied the choral entry procession. Sadly, after that, whatever chance this Te Deum performance had was undercut by the resonant cathedral acoustics of the Basílica da Estrela, in which the soaring dome and vaulted spaces swallowed and muddled the choral sound. This was a shame, since the early instruments orchestra and choir both sounded great. I guess this performance was authentic in that the the piece was written for the Great Chapel at Versailles, another tall and resonant space. But the only music that really came through here was the brass and one or two singers with more nasal, edgy voices that could cut through the muck. The concert began with a pleasant Concerto for 4-part Viols by Charpentier. Here the instruments here sounded a bit more present and clear than in the choral piece. The audience seemed to love all this, standing en masse at the end. I did not.  

Most disappointing of all was the orchestral concert of Brahms and Schubert by the Portuguese Chamber Orchestra at the Belém Cultural Center. The leisurely conducting of Emilio Pomàrico undercut any sense of forward motion or rhythmic contrast to be found in these romantic standards. The Brahms A major Serenade felt like settling into a comfy stuffed chair: warm, comforting...and unexciting. The sluggish tempos in the Scherzo and the ending Rondo denuded the piece of needed contrast. The Schubert Fifth Symphony in B flat was even more sluggish. This is a classical, not romantic symphony, written for a chamber orchestra, and feeling much like late Mozart. Schubert composed it in 1816 in the midst of his sets of very innovative, Romantic songs. So should it sound Classical or Romantic (or both?). The young (19 yo) Schubert was very inclined to hop around in his style, sometimes being radical/innovative, sometimes evocative of older styles (Mozart, Haydn). Beethoven also did this: for example, his classical 8th Symphony is followed by the revolutionary, romantic 9th. The Schubert 5th falls between Beethoven's 8th and 9th, so continues this tension of new and old styles. But regardless of the interpretive stance of the conductor, Schubert should not sound like Bruckner, as the second movement Andante did in this performance (rather like this one on YouTube.)  Andante does not mean largo or somnolent, and should move forward more like this....notice on this video how the conductor conducts in 1 beat to the bar, not 3, moving things along. In this Lisbon performance there was barely a detectable pulse. Perplexed, at home I looked at several versions on Apple music, I saw this movement lasting from 6 to 14 minutes (!) so there does not appear to be interpretive consensus here in how romantically to play Schubert. The bottom line was that this Andante felt here like a lugubrious 14+ minute slog, and I squirmed in my seat. So there was not much of a holiday vibe here, unfortunately.