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A Fall Organ Festival in Portugal

January 24, 2003
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Chestnut roasters selling their aromatic wares on the avenues of Lisbon and the cobbled streets of Evora, as well as the slightly guttural sounds of Portuguese, spoken all around me, signaled decisively that I was not in Texas during the third week of October 2000. Warm, sunny fall weather greeted travelers to Portugal October 24-29, the week of the fourth annual organ festival in the Alentejo region, 100 miles or so southeast of Lisbon. Organized by organist and historian João Paulo Janeiro, the programs took place in Evora, Vila Viçosa, Serpa, Alvito, Estremoz, and Arraiolos. Featured works this year were from the time of Portuguese monarch Dom João V (1706-50); four of the concerts utilized distinctive 18th-century organs.

 

The first events took place in the municipal museum of Evora, where eminent musicologist and Iberian music specialist Gerhard Doderer led a late-afternoon seminar on the little-known composer Jaime de la Te y Sagan (d. 1736). Being decidedly Portuguese-challenged, I decided to continue my recovery from the rigors of a long trip, and join the festival-goers later that evening for the first concert, a revelatory recital by Professor Doderer's wife, Cremilde Rosado Fernandes (Professor of Harpsichord at the Escola Superior de Musica in Lisbon). Playing a triple-fretted clavichord in a program of four sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti, six by Carlos Seixas, and three by Antonio Soler, Mme. Fernandes played with grace and authority. Tastefully ornamented repeats, musical and skillful, banished any thoughts of boredom. It was especially good to hear, successively, two possible solutions to the tremulo "problem" in Scarlatti's scores: Fernandes gave us both mordent and repeated note trills in K. 208.

Concerts beyond Evora took place in smaller towns, difficult (if not impossible) to reach by public transport. Since I had no desire to drive a rental car (there were enough musical thrills without adding death-defying negotiation of tiny alleys and highway acrobatics), it was only through the good graces of Senhor Janeiro, who drove the not-inconsiderable distance from Lisbon for each program, that I was able to attend most of the programs. Wednesday's recital in Vila Viçosa was set in the chapel of the Ducal Palace, a marble building of imposing grandeur. The organ, in a side gallery, is an unsigned instrument, perhaps the work of an 18th-century German builder (Janeiro suggests Ulenkampf because of the non-Iberian Cromorne and Sesquialtera registers included in this one-manual instrument of eleven stops). Organist Jesus Martin Moro (Professor of Organ in the Conservatory at Pau) played a suitable and vigorous program of works by Cabanilles, Mestres, Casanoves, Frei Jacinto do Sacramento, Seixas, Domenico Scarlatti (the first time I had ever heard his "Cat" Fugue, K. 30 played on the organ), ending with an exhilarating Sonata de Clarines by Soler. The drive back to Evora was made memorable by the sudden appearance of four wild pigs, crossing the road very sedately directly in front of us.

I did not attend the Thursday concert for viola da gamba and organ, given by Hille Perl and Michael Behringer (Freiburg-im-Breisgau). According to reports from listeners the temperament of the organ in Igreja Matriz, Serpa, was quite astringent for the advanced modulations of the Bach Sonatas in G and D. Other works on the program were by Corelli, Poglietti, and Bononcini. On this day I was driven from Evora to Alvito (in the car of the Regional Minister of Culture), booked into a five-star pousada, the Castello of Alvito (a renovated historic building now run as a luxury hotel by the government), and introduced to the glorious 1785 organ by Pacali Caetano Oldovini, in Igreja Matriz, where I would play the next recital in the series.

Oldovini, an Italian who built organs in Evora and throughout the Alentejo, was the link which first brought me to Portugal several years ago. The Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University owns the unique Oldovini organ to be found outside Europe. Our 1762 instrument, purchased in 1983 from Dutch musicologist M. A. Vente, was originally in the Cathedral of Evora. Senhor Janeiro, who has made an inventory of surviving instruments by Oldovini, had written me to ascertain details of our instrument, and since has guided me in visits to other instruments from this builder's hand.

The organ in Alvito, built in the last year of Oldovini's life, is a magnifcent single-manual instrument of nine registers (with an extended compass to D5 and bass short octave). Especially beautiful are the Flautado (8-foot Principal), stopped flute (4-foot), an Italianate Voz humana (celesting rank), and the Clarim (a brilliant en-chamade reed, from middle C-sharp up). The church interior, richly adorned with ceramic tiles and gold-inlaid altars, provides a warm, resonant space.

I divided my program into two halves: first, music of the "Iberian Heritage"--works by Valente, Pablo Bruna, an anonymous Obra de falsas cromaticas (to show the Voz humana), and three works by Cabanilles. Then, as requested, music from the time of Dom João: two sonatas by Seixas, alternating with short pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach, two Scarlatti sonatas, and finally a rip-roaring Seixas Fugue in A minor, with the Clarim blaring away on the repeats of A and B sections.

Another beautiful organ (post-Oldovini, 1791) was heard in the recital by Rui Paiva (Professor of Organ at the National Conservatory in Lisbon) on Sunday evening in Igreja San Francisco, Estremoz. His program, largely comprising galant music from Italy, proved to be exciting due to intense, energetic playing of works by Zipoli, Paganelli, Padre Martini, Galuppi, Domenico Scarlatti, and Handel (Fugue in B-flat Major, Concerto in F "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale").

A very late-night trip back to Lisbon, with an unforgettable approach to the city over Santiago Calatrava's Vasco da Gama Bridge (the longest in Europe), an early morning arrival at Lisbon Airport, and the shock of flight cancellations (the worst storms in a decade had hit western Europe), led to an unscheduled extra day in Lisbon. Not, however, a long enough delay to allow attendance at the final concert of the festival, a harpsichord recital by Ana Mafalda Castro (Professor of Harpsichord at the Escola Superior de Musica in Porto), on Friday November 3 in Arraiolos (music of Pedro de Araujo, Francesco Durante, Zipoli, G. B. Platti, Seixas, Scarlatti, and Soler).

The IV Jornadas de Orgão Alentejo was a festival which met its artistic goal:   the presentation of a specific Iberian keyboard repertoire on treasured instruments of the region, with enough additional music from non-Iberian composers to establish context and provide further 18th-century compositions for comparison. Funding from the Culture Ministry, the Archdiocese of Evora, and the Foundation of the Casa de Bragança supported the engaging of artists from four countries--making this truly an international effort. Although attendance was less than in former years, thanks to the artistic vision and organizational skills of festival director João Paulo Janeiro, those who attended the programs heard, once again, a rich and colorful selection of baroque music played on instruments for which it was intended. Well-restored organs in picturesque historic sites, the lure of memorable food and those outstanding local wines, as well as a reason to spend time in Portugal: what could be better? And there was the smell of chestnuts roasting . . .

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