‘Spare me Lord, for as nothing are my days’ reads the opening of the first of three readings (Parce mihi, Domine) from the Matins of the Office for the Dead on this new disc of music by Francisco Garro. The despair of the speaker doesn’t let up, the reading concluding, ‘Behold now in the dust shall I sleep, and if early you seek me, I shall be no more.’ A desolate scene plucked from the anguish-strewn Book of Job, addressed as much to mourners as to the deceased, a stark reminder of mortality. If any consolation is to emerge, it must come from the music. Garro obliges. The anguish is certainly there from the start, but so is an extraordinary warmth dotted with occasional piquant harmony. Cupertinos sing with such commitment that one could be forgiven for thinking this was an actual liturgy being enacted and we were part of the congregation. In the lessons they sing, taken from each of the three Nocturns from the Office, there’s a progression from earthly to spiritual reflected strikingly in the music. The last, Spiritus meus, has an appropriately ethereal air, the eight voices drifting along separate paths, not lost exactly but awestruck, the realisation that hope can only rest with God only gradually dawning, and brilliantly captured by Garro’s understated setting of the final exclamation ‘Tu es Domine Deus meus’. Cupertinos invest that with a tentativeness born of humility, an intelligence of approach that pervades their entire recital.

But hold on. Who was Francisco Garro? Why has this striking music never been recorded before? The fact is that behind the excellence of the performances here, there’s a musicological achievement of equal accomplishment for which we must thank Cupertinos’s Director, Luís Toscano and José Abreu, an expert on the choral music of Portugal of this period. Garro was a Spanish-born composer who became one of the leading figures in Portuguese sacred music at the turn of the seventeenth century. Born in Alfaro in northern Spain, he was appointed Master of the Royal Chapel in Lisbon in 1592. In 1609 he published two collections of sacred music in Lisbon. Although issued in the same year, the two publications are quite different. One is a choirbook containing masses, motets and antiphons, broadly following the traditional polyphonic style of imitative counterpoint. The other is a set of partbooks devoted to large-scale polychoral works, masses, defunctorum lectiones and alleluias for eight and twelve voices. They are arranged in multiple choirs that alternate antiphonally, using homophonic textures, rapid dialogue, and contrasts of metre and rhythm for dramatic effect.

For many years confusion surrounded these publications. A typographical error led some writers to attribute the works to a composer named ‘Francisco Garcia’, an error further compounded by an assumption that the two collections were in fact a single publication in different formats. Only in the twentieth century was the mistake resolved, the music correctly identified as Garro’s, and the surviving 1609 publications examined. The partbook is problematic. The surviving parts are held in three libraries but even taken together they remain incomplete. One voice is always missing, though which voice varies. Some works are scored for SATB, others SSAT. José Abreu reconstructed the missing voices through detailed comparative study of the three surviving sources and close analysis of Garro’s compositional style and techniques. On the evidence of these performances, he has done a magnificent job.

Having pieces from the choirbook and partbook provides a welcome opportunity for stylistic comparison. Take the two masses. The Missa O quam pulchra es from the choirbook is a four-part parody mass probably based on a lost motet by Garro. It’s a perfectly executed example of that more traditional polyphonic style, Garro sustaining an equilibrium throughout between the meditative and the joyful. The Missa Cantate Domino in eight parts comes as a surprise after that. Abreu’s reconstruction allows us to hear Garro’s full antiphonal design, where quite short fragments of syllabically set material are distributed between the choirs, resulting in a dynamic, continually varied and expressive experience, beautifully realised by Cupertinos.

It’s noticeable that in his polychoral settings Garro always seems to be striving primarily for the contemplative rather than power or intensity. Compare Garro’s settings of the Defunctorum lectiones with Victoria’s setting of one of them, a different text from Job, Taedet animam meam. (Try the superb recording by David Hill and Westminster Cathedral Choir, which prefaces their account of the Victoria Requiem, also on Hyperion). Victoria is writing for four voices but achieves extraordinary fervour and intensity in his concentrated polyphonic style. Garro seems to project Job’s laments outwards through the use of spatial contrasts and antiphonal dialogue, and that externalization feels inherently more meditative.

I haven’t touched on all of the music on this disc, but I hope I’ve given enough of the flavour to show what a fascinating rediscovery Garro is. He could not have better advocates than Cupertinos and Toscano. Their sound has been very well captured in the warm acoustic of the Basílica do Bom Jesus in Braga. If you are at all interested in the musicology which I’ve attempted to summarise above, Toscano and Abreu have provided first-class and detailed booklet notes.