The Sixteen's involvement with Iberian music continues with a programme of works by two contemporaries, both students together at Evora, both later employed at Lisbon and patronized by the Spanish kings during their annexation of Portugal and by the House of Braganca that restored the country to independence in 1640.
Of the two, Duarte Lobo enjoyed the greater reputation, but to judge by their current discographies, it was Manuel Cardoso who was the more imaginative and adventurous composer (though Portuguese music generally must have seemed very old-fashioned by seventeenth-century standards). Cardoso's treatment of dissonance at times belies a contrapuntal technique rooted in the style of Palestrina. This can be clearly heard in the five-voice Missa Regina caeli, where the listener is apparently on familiar ground when suddenly there is the odd delightful tremor (try the Benedictus, for example).
Lobo's Requiem for eight voices was published in 1621 and is not to be confused with his later six-voice setting of 1639 (recorded by the Tallis Scholars on Gimell, 3/93). Despite its heavier scoring, the eight-voice work is less elaborate than its successor and has fewer movements. It shares with other Iberian Requiems an emphasis on solemn, simple chordal writing.
Both composers share a very Portuguese fondness for sonority, an attribute that The Sixteen possess in abundance. The result is a programme that varies in tone from robustness in Cardoso's Mass to restraint in Lobo's Requiem and funeral motets; however the confidence of the singers in their chosen repertoire is evident from first to last.'