FRANCISCO GARRO: MASSES, O QUAM PULCHRA ES & CANTATE DOMINO

MASSES, O QUAM PULCHRA ES & CANTATE DOMINO

Following the acclaimed and award-winning recordings dedicated to Manuel Cardoso, Duarte Lobo, Pedro de Cristo and Filipe de Magalhães, in partnership with the renowned label Hyperion Records, the vocal ensemble Cupertinos dedicates the present recording to Francisco Garro, one of the most distinguished and intriguing figures in the History and Historiography of Music in Portugal.

A native of Alfaro—a historic Spanish town located in the Ebro valley, between Zaragoza and Logroño—he served as Maestro de Capilla at Sigüenza Cathedral before, within the Iberian context of the Dual Monarchy (1580–1640), being appointed Master of the Royal Chapel in Lisbon, succeeding António Carreira. A key figure in the transition between the 16th and 17th centuries, he held this position for more than three decades, collaborating with Filipe de Magalhães—who would later succeed him—and publishing, in 1609, two volumes of sacred works printed in Lisbon by Pieter van Craesbeeck, pioneers of music printing with movable type in Portugal. These two collections, formally and conceptually distinct—one in choirbook format, the other in partbooks entirely dedicated to polychoral repertoire—constitute the sources for the programme presented here by the Cupertinos vocal ensemble.

The coincidence of both publications appearing in the same year, together with a presumed typographical error in the spelling of the surname, sparked a long-standing historiographical misunderstanding, perpetuated by Barbosa Machado, Joaquim de Vasconcelos and Ernesto Vieira. It was only at the end of the 19th century that the existence of an alleged “Francisco Garcia” began to be questioned, correctly attributing the works to the Spanish composer Francisco Garro. The definitive clarification would only come in 1956, when Manuel Joaquim established the identification of two distinct publications, with different contents and formats.

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