I wonder what the seventeenth-century Portuguese composer Manuel Cardoso(1566-1650), for most of his life a monk at a Carmelite monastery in Lisbon, would have made of the idea that his music would enjoy a revival in the 1990s? This recording of his Missa Miserere mihi Domine (a first) from the Ensemble Vocal Europeen is a further – and very welcome – contribution to our knowledge and appreciation of the flowering of sacred polyphony in Portugal in the first half of the seventeenth century, music that, seen in a wider European context, seems “out of phase with its time” (to quote the accompanying notes). With music as fine as this, however, any latter-day perception of an unbroken line of musical progress seems completely irrelevant. The penitential nature of the chant on which this Mass is based is reinforced here by the choice of two wonderfully gloomy motets that are interpolated as if for performance at the Elevation and the Communion respectively, though that may not have been their original function. In particular, “Sitivit anima”, more usually associated with the Requiem Mass, is one of those marvellously expressive texts that so inspired Iberian composers, and Cardoso’s setting, highly reminiscent of Victoria with its never-ending sequence of suspensions, is up there with the best. Only the more straightforward, five-voice Magnificat lightens the tone of a disc that otherwise wallows in glorious misery.
Throughout, Herreweghe and his European choir sing superbly, responding sensitively to the words – notably in the longer movements of the Mass which are too often performed perfunctorily – and creating a full and sonorous sound that well suits Cardoso’s music. Full credit, too, to Herreweghe – and the Harmonia Mundi technicians – for achieving such an exceptionally satisfactory balance between the voice parts. A must for all Iberian enthusiasts, present and future.'