St Mary’s, Bourne Street.

SW1W 8JJ

 

Saturday 14 February 2026, 7.30pm

 

Guest conductor: Toby Ward

​

On All Saints’ Day, 1755, an earthquake off the coast of Portugal shook Lisbon violently. The subsequent fires burnt one of the most important libraries of western music of all time, that of King John IV ‘the restorer’ of Portugal (1604-1656) which held a vast amount of polyphony from Portugal and further afield, and as the city reeled in horror, the tsunami which followed the fires sealed the total destruction of Lisbon.

 

There were, however, some surviving fragments of the Golden Age of polyphony which were kept outside the great King’s library. Copies of the first music ever published in Lisbon in 1609 was taken to the Spanish Netherlands, tiny portions of repertoire published in Madrid, and even music surviving in the great cathedral libraries in Mexico.

 

In this programme, the Renaissance Singers trace the surviving fragments of a tradition destroyed by disaster, beginning with the sequence at the beginning of High Mass, before heading towards surviving fragments written for the penitential seasons of Lent and Christmas, and finally holding a Requiem for the tens of thousands who died that day, the city razed, and countless works burnt on their shelves which we will never know or hear.

 

This is a restored portrait of precious fragments from of the Golden Age of Portuguese polyphony which was razed to the ground, scored into ash, and until very recently, forgotten.