Nuno Corte-Real: Tremor

Nuno Corte-Real's short song cycle Tremor for a female voice with chorus and instrumental accompaniment, based on poems by Pedro Mexia, is all about the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Not a story set to sound, but an almost abstract exercise of moods from words and images.

Nor is it a matter of treating the earthquake as an allegory, but of placing the catastrophe and other human experiences of fear and transience on a continuum, based on a very small vocabulary, a vocal and musical grammar of fear and anxiety.