Choral Music from the Portugese Renaissance

- Specific project of Studium Chorale have been programmes with Romantic music for choirs with motets by Brahms, Mendelssohn and Reger, Liszt's Via Crucis, and music from the Portugese Golden Age as recorded on this CD. This programme was also performed with enormous succes during the Gulbenkian Festival 1992 in Lisbon and the present recording was at the specific request of the Gulbenkian Foundation!

- Studium Chorale performs regularly at home and abroad and has taken part in many festivals: Musica Sacra in Maastricht, the Festival of Flanders in Bruges and Tongres, the Rheinisches Musikfest, the Festival of Schwäbisch-Gmünd and Passau, and the Festival de Musica Antiga in Lisbon and Obidos.

- The two main works on this CD are the Missa pro defunctis by Filipe de Magalhaes and the Lamentations for Maundy Thursday by Joao Lourenco Rebelo. Recordings of these and also of the other works are very to find in the international catalogues.

- These performances are without a doubt fine examples of the great choral tradition in the Low Countries. The recording was made in one of the many beautiful old churces in Maastricht and has exactly the right atmosphere for this wonderful repertoire. Full texts and translations in the booklet. 

The chamber choir Studium Chorale was founded in 1972, when a number of students at the Maastricht Conservatory found themsevles united in their enthusiasm for high quality choral singing from different stylistic periods. Studium Chorale now has twenty-two members, most of whom are theaching as well. Initially, the choir sang mainly Renaissance and Baroque music. They followed specialisted courses and worked with a number of guest conductors among whom Jan Boeke, Frans Moonen, Philippe Herreweghe and Paul van Nevel. Between 1981 and 1987 Studium Chorale took an intensive interest in contemporary music, stimulated by several new compositions dedicated to the choir. Since 1987, the choir has been building up its repertoire to the broad spectrum of five centuries of choral culture it now covers. The men of Studium Chorale form a separate Schola for Gregorian chant, and they made an intensive study of the MSS of Sankt Glaaen, Laon and Einsiedeln. Eric Hermans studied in Frankfurt with the famous choir director Kurt Thomas. He specialised in early music performance practice through courses at the Foundation for Performance Practice at the Department of Music at Utrecht University, and went to professor A. Kurris, Maastricht for tuition in Gregorian chant. Besides being a conductor and singing teacher, Eric Hermans had a long-lasting connection with the Maastricht Drama Academy and the Antwerp Conservatory where he taught voice production and text expression. His highly personal ideas about text experience and the special relationship he advocates between speaking and singing, language and music, are the inspiration of his musical interpretations.