2024-08-01 14:39:48
The theme of passion and desire is the interwoven compositions that were played this Monday at the castle in Prague’s Troja. The concert called Fantasia portuguesa was prepared by the Summer Festival of Early Music. Charismatic singers and a virtuoso orchestra offered a captivating excursion into Baroque Portuguese art. The atmosphere of the noble court and the energetic sunny countryside breathed on the audience.
Portugal remains rather a side of interest in local music history textbooks, and we rarely hear the works of local authors on world stages. When repertoire originating from the Iberian Peninsula appears in classical music, it is more often a representative of neighboring Spain.
At this year’s 25th anniversary summer festival of early music, whose leitmotif is dreaming and imagination, they balanced it out with a magical tasting of vocal and instrumental works by Portuguese Baroque composers. The atmosphere of a hot summer evening in the beautiful premises of the Trojan castle directly encouraged dreaming.
The beginning of the 18th century marked a kind of golden era for Portugal, connected primarily with huge revenues from mineral wealth in colonized Brazil. The royal court of Emperor John V experienced an unprecedented cultural boom and could afford to engage famous Italian composers such as Domenico Scarlatti or Giovanni Bononcini. Many Portuguese artists, on the other hand, went on a study trip to Italy, where they drew inspiration.
The first half of Monday’s concert was mainly in the spirit of Italian court work, wonderfully complemented by the frescoes of the Trojan Baroque hall. Although Portuguese authors Pedro António Avondano, Francisco António de Almeida and Carlos Seixas were on the program, the influence of Roman and Venetian styles, and marginally also of Neapolitan opera, was noticeable. It featured compositions exclusively in Italian – at that time widespread throughout Europe as the main singing language of higher musical genres.
Passion and desire
The leading Portuguese orchestra Os Músicos do Tejo, led by the conductor and harpsichordist Marco Magalhães, performed a perfect interplay of historical instruments with precise, authentic sound and brilliant dynamics in Prague. The chamber ensemble made both the instrumental moments and the sensitive accompaniment of arias from operas or songs stand out.
The first half of the evening belonged to soprano Ana Vieira Leita. | Photo: Petra Hajská
Singer-wise, the first half belonged to Ana Vieira Leite. The young soprano is a laureate of the Jardin des Voix academy of the famous early music ensemble Les Arts Florissants, and she makes a profile especially with her baroque repertoire. In Prague, she performed arias from Portuguese operas of the 18th century, which connected the subtitle of the evening, namely the theme of passion and desire.
The charming singer with a light lyrical voice demonstrated an excellent historically taught technique and a great feeling for working with affects and expression. Baroque interpretation used to be largely subordinated to working with the emotions expressed by the text, and more than rhythmic or intonation precision, it emphasized precisely the most faithful transmission of feelings. This gave the performer considerable freedom in dynamics and tempo.
In the wistful arias, Leite in a pink lace dress with flowers looked dreamy and fragile, she had beautiful soft beginnings and she set the notes even in the highs with the absolute lightness of a summer breeze. But the emotionally strained passages, when she showed the power of her voice in the high pitches, also suited her perfectly. In the fiery arias, interpreted with appropriate fervor and passion, her anger was almost palpable. She scrolled the notes on the tablet with an elegant and almost invisible hand gesture that seemed part of the expression and was certainly less distracting than if she were turning the classic sheets of music.
She was rather frugal in decorating dacapa parts, which was a testament to her voice, and due to the specific regional concept, she did not have to show large virtuoso coloraturas to impress the listeners. However, during the single more drawn-out and complex ornamental passage without accompaniment, it seemed as if she lost the key and masked the dissonance with the orchestra with an almost inaudible pianissimo at the end. However, this can be easily forgiven due to the overall excellent performance.
The concert at the Troy castle breathed on the audience the atmosphere of a noble court and the sunny countryside. | Photo: Petra Hajská
Passionate Portuguese countryside
The second half of the concert, with songs in Portuguese, seemed out of this world. While the former evoked rather elegant noble residences, gallant knights and ladies in baroque robes, the latter offered a much more varied composition of genres and authors. She presented a secular work, connected more with urban and rural audiences, based mainly on the typical Portuguese fado genre.
Its origin dates back to the beginning of the 19th century, when the court moved from Lisbon to Brazil. There, the original roots of the Portuguese dance genre from the 17th century were mixed with elements of Brazilian dances, Afro-Brazilian lund or modinho – a sentimental salon song with expressive emotions. In it, Ana Vieira Leite was accompanied at the concert by leading performer fado Marco Oliviera.
He also got space in several solo compositions with the guitar, which showed the authentic form of this music – melancholic compositions dealing with bitterness, longing and fatalism. The listeners appreciated the printed program of the concert containing the lyrics of the songs with a Czech translation.
In addition to the very soft-sounding Portuguese, there was also a singing technique associated with fado, which contains folklore elements, unsmoothed glissandos, loose melismata and large dynamic changes on one note, as well as atypical harmonic procedures, sometimes reminiscent of Romani music. With all this, Oliviera created an excellent “civilian” counterpoint to the operatic style of the soprano. In duets, despite this difference, they sounded equal, vocally relatively balanced.
In the second half, Ana Vieira Leite “bloomed” even more into a joyful, flirtatious and playful diva, smiling all the time and sweetly dancing to the rhythm in the interludes. During the encore, she even stuck a piece of carnation behind her ear from a donated flower matching her dress. At first she sang excerpts from António Teixeira’s opera written in the 18th century, but then she adapted to a more civil style of singing.
The highlight of the evening was a lundum-type piece called Os efeitos da ternura, followed by a ganinha, in which Portuguese, Latin American and African elements were most mixed. The song by the anonymous author was captured in his description by an Englishman traveling to Lisbon who met two violinists on the street – one always played harmonic accompaniment and the other improvised. They spontaneously took turns in this order, the conductor explained to the people of Prague. The lively composition, accompanied by vocals and an orchestra, was full of energy, and in the spirit of the themed imagination, one could almost see the sunny streets of Portugal, in which one wants to dance to the beat.
Brazilian modinha by Manuel da Camara and compositions by António da Silva Leite were also heard, in which the influence of Mozart’s operas could be heard and which foreshadowed classical music. Marco Oliviera then excelled in the solo fado Amoe é água que corre.
Marco Oliviera also accompanied himself on guitar while singing the fado. | Photo: Petra Hajská
The concert was closed by two tornadillas, compositions of the Spanish theater genre similar to operetta, by the local author living in Lisbon, José Palomino. Both soloists excelled in them, they also contained spoken parts. It’s just a shame that the encore sounded identical to the last item in the program, it could have been more contrasting in terms of style and subject matter.
The extraordinary evening in the premises of the beautiful Trojan castle and its illuminated gardens left a dazzling impression and also presented Portuguese art in the best light. The performers showed with their fantasy “taste” that it is worth the Czech audience to discover and get to know it more closely.