In this new article series, together with Ambronay’s Sustainable EEEMERGING and its partners, we explore Early music across Europe – and the challenges faced by young artists in various countries across the continent. What is the condition of Early music today?
This article was supported by Academia de Música de Espinho, Portugal.
It may be the first time that anyone’s referred to recorder-player António Godinho as “Mr Portugal”, but I’m at pains to point out on a video call between here and Porto that I mean it in an Early music context. Even so, he laughs: “That’s quite a responsibility!”
But it’s one he’s equal to. Since finishing his studies in Basel last year, 26-year-old Godinho is already performing and recording with some of Europe’s best-known Early musicians as well as with his own newly-formed ensemble, Terebinthus. Portugal’s Early music scene is flourishing, and Godinho’s career along with it.
Music is a compulsory subject in primary school in Portugal, which might explain Godinho’s assertion that it was “perfectly normal” that he should find himself in Coimbra’s conservatoire at the age of 8. The recorder was, for him, the obvious choice. Did he ever consider anything else? “Not really. I had a recorder already, I knew how to play it a bit and I just kept going. I think my parents were a bit surprised I didn’t pick something like the violin or the piano. But no. It was always recorder.”
The capital city in medieval times, whose historic buildings – including the breathtaking Bibliotecca Joanina – have been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Coimbra is a living reminder of Portugal’s Golden Age. All that architectural history can’t have hurt a young Godinho beginning to get a sense of in which direction his musical interests might develop. But it wasn’t so much the palpable heritage that drew Godinho to Early music – in fact quite the opposite.
“In this kind of music, there’s a space for the performer to be very present, not just as a playback machine,” Godinho explains. “You get a score and do what it says, but in the process of doing that, you create the music. In repertoire where notation is less specific about certain elements, we need to be more active in deciding how to play things. There’s always a very organic quality to the music making. There’s so much we don’t know, but we can make an educated guess. Maybe that’s actually more interesting than the truth. Who knows?”
Godinho’s studies introduced him to many people in search of answers to those same questions, including Pedro Sousa Silva, Professor of Early Music Research at Escola Superior de Música, Artes e Espectáculo, Porto, and internationally renowned for his work as a soloist and with his various ensembles including Arte Minima. “Pedro was in many regards my first mentor and I think a lot of the musician I am comes from that time,” Godinho says. “I wouldn’t be the recorder player I am without him.” So how was it to cross over the line from student to colleague, when the two began to work together? “It was a very natural transition. You just get to know someone as a person, as a musician – he’s an amazing recorder player – you finish school, you stay in touch and now, let’s be colleagues.”
From Porto, Godinho continued his studies at Basel’s Schola Cantorum, where he met another key teacher-turned-collaborator, the recorder-player and harpsichordist Corina Marti. “We had an instant connection,” he says, “It’s amazing how clear it was. We’d have lessons and now we have projects together and we work together.”
These crucial musical relationships meant that Godinho has been able to hit the ground running. In March this year Arte Minima, with Godinho on board, released the first volume of a three-year project with Pan Classics, recording all the motets of Vicente Lusitano’s Liber Primus Epigramatum of 1551. The sensitive blend of voices and recorders bring a gentle richness to these extraordinarily beautiful works at the epicentre of the Portuguese Renaissance. “If you want to know about Portuguese Early music,” advises Godinho, “start there.”
A key figure in the musical life of mid-16th century, Vicente Lusitano was known at the time more for his important treatise on the art of counterpoint and his very public dispute about the rules of composition with Venetian composer Nicolo Vicentino. When the adjudicating panel from the Sistine Chapel declared Lusitano the winner, Vicentino published a fake account of proceedings that made him look like the progressive. All this might sound like just a rarified spat, except that Lusitano – whose profile more or less disappeared from music history – wasn’t only one of the 16th century’s most daringly complex composers, he is Europe’s earliest recorded composer of colour.
Portugal’s early Islamic occupation and its colonial history means that as more and more of the unpublished music from the country’s golden age reaches audiences, there is a unique story for Portuguese Early music to tell. It has deep implications for the origins of what we understand as European Early music and its instrumentation. “You have to remember,” says Godinho, “that the last bastion of Muslim culture existed well into the 14th century on the Iberian Peninsula, and there would have been specific rites, specific chants and so on that made it into the music of the time.”
Arte Minima is just one of a growing number of Portugal’s Early music ensembles keen to find connections between the ancient and the contemporary, or to traverse national or cultural boundaries. Sete Lágrimas, for example, combine material and instrumentation from the 15th and 16th centuries with some of the rhythms and techniques of popular contemporary music. The Lisbon-based Ludovice Ensemble include Sephardic Jewish Baroque in their wide-ranging repertoire.
For their skill and attention to the country’s 16th- and 17th-century repertoire, vocal ensemble Cupertinos have come to be regarded as Portugal’s “national team” polyphonically speaking; they host the International Portuguese Polyphony Festival in Coimbra and Porto, and their Hyperion recordings of works by Duarte Lobo, Manuel Cordoso and Felipe de Magalhães have won plaudits from Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine. Inspired by her research into the role of the cello in Portuguese vocal music, Diana Vinagre founded Ensemble Bonne Corde, and their recording of an anonymous Portuguese arrangement of Mozart’s Requiem for celli, bass, bassoons and chamber organ brings an intimate and stately sonority to this familiar piece.
One of the newest ensembles is Godinho’s own Terebinthus, formed about a year ago with fellow students from the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. Comprising harp, voices, organetto and recorders, Terebinthus specialises in music of the 14th and 15th centuries, and their name is a clue to their approach. “Terebinthus is not so much a name as a motto,” explains Godinho, “it’s a tree from which the people of the Middle Ages extracted a kind of balm. It was a quite expensive and exquisite product. That’s the kind of music we believe in terms of the aesthetic we’re looking for.
“For a long time, the music of the Middle Ages has always been connected to the idea of folk music, but what we’re trying to achieve is to recreate what we believe would have been the highly exquisite standard that this music requires. Some of the music composed in the period was some of the most sophisticated music that has come down to us, not just in terms of notational complexity, but in terms of everything it requires musicians to be able to do.” It’s no accident, either, that the terebinthus or turpentine tree is to be found not just in Portugal, but throughout the Mediterranean and MENA region. “Music always circulates,” says Godinho, “as musicians certainly always did.”
It’s a busy Autumn for Godinho, preparing for concerts in Porto and Lisbon with Arte Minima and Musurgia Ensemble. October 17th sees the release of his Harmonia Mundi recording of Brandenburg Concerto no. 4, with Amandine Beyer’s ensemble Gli Incogniti. (Amandine Beyer led the Ambronay Academy earlier this year, mentoring young musicians and performing across Spain and Portugal.) “Recording it was a quite surreal experience, I have to say, for several reasons,” he says. “Number one, it’s one of the best-known Baroque ensembles in the world, and we were recording with Pedro as well. We had only one afternoon and one morning, and we recorded in the conservatory in Coimbra, where I grew up.” Musicians do circulate: they also come full circle.
Portugal’s Early music scene is a healthy one, playing host to festivals including the West Coast Early Music Festival in the Algarve, SIMA in Castelo Branca and the Festival Internacional de Música Barroca de Faro. Godinho is keen to point out that what used to be a fringe space now has a broadening appeal. “But,” he says, “there could be more support locally. Institutions and projects like Sustainable EEEMERGING are very good because they take these young performers and connect them to concerts and venues and festival organisers and give them a chance. This is great and it’s at a European or international level. But this needs to be complemented by something at a local level. Out of a hundred or dozens of ensembles that apply to an open call, one organisation can only take a handful, so I would say we need to make a market, create new festivals, new summer schools and so on.”
The demand, Godinho says, is there. “Now more than ever it’s definitely a young people thing. Not just the musicians performing but also the audiences. Perhaps what the young audiences need is not exactly education but opportunities for access that have never existed before – not just social media, but specific new technologies that give people new ways to connect with each other and show people what we can offer.”
Music has always relied on new technologies. António Godinho is only suggesting that Portugal moves with the times.
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Sustainable EEEMERGING is funded by the European Union.
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
This article was sponsored by Centre culturel de rencontre d’Ambronay.
