Motets for Advent performed by Grupo Vocal Olisipo

An edition of three motets for Advent by Francisco José Perdigão, a late-eighteenth-century chapel master of Évora Cathedral, that I prepared for the Sacra XVIII series of the Editions MPMP (it will be published in early-2019 and will be available HERE) will be performed by Grupo Vocal Olisipo, a Lisbon-based vocal ensemble directed by Armando Possante.

The group will give a concert in the Church of Conceição Velha, Lisbon, next December 23rd with a programme comprising music for Christmas time. The three motets by Perdigão – Amen dico vobis, Cum audisset Joannes and Omnis vallis implebitur, will be performed in the first part of the concert, together with works by Manuel Mendes and Estêvão Lopes Morago. I am not sure but this will probably be the first modern performance of these works, at least, one of first performances.

Perdigão was chapel master of Évora Cathedral in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, and he supervised the copying of several books comprising vocal polyphony in the stile antico for use in the Cathedral. In one of these books – Códice n.º 10 – we find the three motets for Advent in what one may call a “neo-stile-antico style”. I do hope GVO can record these works, they draw much from Manuel Cardoso’s Advent motets of the Livro de varios motetes (1648), but in a style resembling the Portuguese stile concertato sacred vocal works of the late eighteenth century, notably the addition of dissonant harmonic and melodic intervals (i.e. augmented fourths). News about this concert in Glosas online.