The four-voice Clarifica me Pater by Giovanni Giorgi is an extended setting divided into two partes of the short antiphon for the canticle of Lauds on Tuesday of Holy Week; the Vila Viçosa source places it as an Offertory motet for the Monday. Giorgi, identified as João Jorge in Portuguese sources, came to Lisbon from Rome in about 1725 and had an active role in the Italian domination of music in Lisbon at the time. Unlike most of his music which, in the current style, used instrumental accompaniment and interludes, this motet is a freely-developed imitative piece in a stile antico dressed in an eighteenth-century harmonic idiom, often with changing harmonies over an anchoring pedal point, and characterized by long melismas on prominent vowels. A contrast to the continuous imitation is a passage with repeated homophonic injunctions of ‘apud te’ (thus – curiously – treating the first syllable of the word ‘temetipsum’ separately) for dramatic emphasis.

from notes by Bernadette Nelson © 1996