Vicente Lusitano: Motets

The Marian Consort, directed by Rory McCleery

In his own time an important music theorist, Lusitano’s reputation and music have both been neglected in ours. As so often with musical figures of the Renaissance, many of the details of his life remain unknown. We can, however, be reasonably confident that he was the first published composer of African heritage. Referred to as ‘pardo’ in one eighteenth-century source, his only surviving printed book of compositions, the Liber primus epigramatum, was issued in Rome in 1551. True to its pioneer spirit as ‘brilliant discoverers, and exponents, of rare repertoire’ (The Observer), The Marian Consort has recorded a carefully chosen programme of these striking and impressive unjustly forgotten works.