Talking to Portuguese early keyboard specialist Fernando Miguel Jalôto about his work and on the subject of Portuguese Baroque repertoire

Fernando Miguel Jalôto © Michal-Novak

 

On July 22nd 2025, I spoke to Fernando Miguel Jalôto at his home in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal.

 

Miguel Jalôto holds Bachelor- and Master of Music degrees from the Department of Ancient Music and Historical Interpretation Practices of the Royal Conservatory in The Hague (Netherlands), a Master’s Degree in Music from the University of Aveiro and a PhD in Music Sciences/Historical Musicology from Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal). He collaborates with specialized Portuguese and international groups and is the founder/artistic director of the Ludovice Ensemble, one of Portugal's most active and prestigious early music groups. He has recorded widely, has appeared on Portuguese-, German-, Estonian- and Czech radio and on the Mezzo, Arte and RTP television channels.

 

PH: Miguel, you play harpsichord, clavichord, fortepiano and Baroque organ and you are a musicologist. Where do you see yourself primarily?

 

FMJ: First, I see myself more as a performer than a researcher, because the musicology and research came out of my need to understand and know more about my job as a performer. And, as a performer, I consider myself, above all, a harpsichordist. The harpsichord was my first instrument, the instrument closest to my heart and the one I play most regularly. But once you are in the world of historic performance practice you understand that it is very hard to draw a line in terms of repertoire, because we share so much repertoire with other keyboard instruments. Also, as a continuo player, you feel the need to study and play the organ and not just be a harpsichordist. One thing has always led me to the other. Of course, as a keyboardist in a Catholic country, you always play a bit of organ - it is part of your DNA. The fortepiano is like a continuation of the harpsichord. I feel that many fortepianists come from the modern piano, but, going from the harpsichord to the fortepiano, I feel I followed the more logical historical process. As to the clavichord, it is such an important instrument, bringing all together, forming a bridge between the organ, harpsichord and the fortepiano. I feel that, with my interest in historic keyboard instruments, they complement each other and give me more tools as a performer. I really love to play the organ and I love to play the clavichord. I also play medieval keyboards. I have an organetto and recently bought a clavicymbalum – it looks like a baby 15th century harpsichord. Its design is based on a manuscript from the late 15th century, drawn by a theoretician who produced the earliest depiction we have of a harpsichord. The maker built the copy based on this drawing. It is interesting to see that our repertoire goes back not just to the 16th century.

 

PH: Do you come from a musical family?

 

FMJ: Not really. I come from a humble family. My father was a taxi driver and my mother a stay-at-home mum. We four siblings all studied music, as our parents felt that music was really important to our education. They didn't send us to study music in order to become musicians, but my older sister did become a solfege teacher. My other sister studied singing. Both sisters played the accordion, a very popular instrument here in Portugal. My brother played the guitar. My maternal grandfather played the guitar and was a good singer. Music is in our family, but not as a family profession.

 

PH: What was your earliest musical experience?

 

FMJ: My mother always loved to sing to us; those are my earliest musical memories. She would sing folk songs, a lot of fado (typical Portuguese music) and she would make up words to adapt the songs to us children. And then, of course, there was church music. Because my sisters were already playing the piano, I started studying piano when I was five years old. I hated it because of the piano teacher, who was not very encouraging. I stopped at age ten. But I loved to sing and sang in choirs until my voice broke. By then, I felt very connected to music and my sister, who was studying singing, suggested I take singing lessons. At that time in Portugal, you could not enrol in singing lessons at a state school before age 18. I was just 16. At the Porto Conservatory, they suggested I start with all the other music subjects. Music education in Portugal offers a very rich curriculum: in addition to learning an instrument, you get solfege, music history, acoustics, choir, chamber music and composition. So, I started with these subjects. One of the subjects was keyboard practice for three years and I was expected to learn piano. With not such good memories of my former piano lessons, I said "no!"  At the school they said you could also take harpsichord. I knew what a harpsichord was, and requested to enrol to do three years of harpsichord study. It was easy to get accepted as the harpsichord teacher didn't have many students. Her name was Maria de Lourdes Alves.  From the very first moment, she was extremely kind and an excellent teacher. I immediately fell in love with the instrument and its repertoire. I recall that, after my first lesson, I already knew that the harpsichord would be a very important part in my life. That's how I started playing harpsichord and my journey to becoming a professional musician. With the Porto Conservatory considered high school level, I finished there at 21.

 

PH: That seems late.

 

FMJ: Well, I started at a later age. But, at the same time, I was starting a degree in architecture at the university. Not absolutely sure of what I wanted to do, I requested a year off from the architecture course to study music in the Netherlands. I never returned to the Architecture Faculty. I stayed in the Netherlands for seven years to do bachelor- and master's degrees, taking one year longer, because, during my masters, I became ill with a neurological disease and needed time to recover. 

 

PH: Where did you go from there?

 

FMJ: I returned to Portugal. That's when I decided I was very happy with early music. As a performer, I had received a very good education in the Netherlands. But, because of my background in architecture, I felt I also needed something more academic. So, I enrolled at Aveiro University (Portugal) to do a (second) master's degree, this time in Music Research and then a PhD in Historical Musicology.

 

PH: Would you like to mention some musicians who have influenced you?

 

FMJ: That's a nice topic, but I must say I am not a person to have big idols or huge admiration for any one person. I can admire someone's work in a particular field or in performance, how someone deals with a certain repertoire or style, but I don't remember finding any artist so amazing that I wanted to imitate the person. As a harpsichordist, my biggest reference for performance and musical understanding is Gustav Leonhardt. He would come to Portugal quite often and I had the opportunity of taking three masterclass lessons with him. He was already very old and no longer officially teaching. Of course, my main teacher, Jacques Ogg, was very important to me in many aspects. He was a student of Leonhardt, so I feel I am a "grandchild" of Leonhardt. Of course, when you study in the Netherlands you have the chance to meet amazing people. I had lessons with the Kuijken brothers – Sigiswald, Wieland and Bart. My closest friend, and co-founder of the Ludovice Ensemble, Joana Amorim, is a flautist and she was a student of Barthold Kuijken. You had the opportunity of contact with all this "golden" generation of Dutch and Belgian early music people. In general, they all make up part of my references. I'm very passionate about French music - I grew up listening to Christophe Rousset, Olivier Beaumont, William Christie and Les Arts Florissants and they were important to my education. But, as I said earlier, these are people I admire in certain areas, but I don't think that everything they do is perfect. A musician I would like to mention is the Italian violinist Enrico Onofri. I met him in Portugal on my return from the Netherlands. He is a fascinating person. I had come from all the rules and strictness of my studies and the importance of reading the treatises and sources. Enrico is very well informed, but he has this very Italian, passionate and free approach to music. I think what I learned from him was to always have the human voice and cantabile sound as my main objective in harpsichord-playing. I do think that what makes me a little different from many (or most) harpsichordists is that I really go for a very vocal, singing approach in my playing. The harpsichord is an instrument that doesn't naturally sing much, but that is my aim and something I learned with Enrico – to imitate the human voice or, sometimes, the violin, the oboe or flute. Amazingly, Gustav Leonhardt had said that when you are playing the harpsichord, you should always imagine you are playing a different instrument or even leading an orchestra, because if you play the harpsichord just thinking about the harpsichord sound, it will end up sounding very dry, mechanical, unmusical and with very serious limitations. Well, I love the instrument's limitations as one loves a person, still accepting their character faults. Enrico was very important to me, and he opened my mind to something which was already there from Leonhardt, my teacher Jacques Ogg and the Dutch school. I don't like the idea that the Italian southern approach to music is completely different from the northern European way. I don't think there is a conflict, but it's true that each of these schools stresses different aspects of musical interpretation. 

 

PH: A major part of your work is your research into- and performance of Portuguese composers. 

 

FMJ: Yes. There is still a lot to do regarding studying, recognizing, evaluating and spreading Portuguese music in Portugal itself. Portuguese classical music and musical heritage, especially relating to the 16th-, 17th- and 18th centuries, are not yet a real part of Portuguese people's lives. There are studies, there are researchers and books, but still our own people have not succeeded in making us proud of this heritage. Something very Portuguese is that we always highly value something coming from abroad, anything that is foreign, but we don't value our own repertoire or composers enough. It's funny, because, when I was studying in the Netherlands, I was also not so conscious of this heritage, of the importance of our music. But, as a Portuguese artist, you start to think it might be interesting to include a Portuguese work in a recital, and then people start asking you about the composers and the music. So, feeling I wanted to find answers for the people enquiring (and to myself) I slowly got more and more into this musical world. We have an amazing repertoire, an amazing heritage. It is not huge, of course, by comparison to other cultural and sociological communities. Portugal had a huge earthquake in 1755, one of the biggest earthquakes in human history. It completely destroyed Lisbon. It destroyed the Royal Palace, the Royal Chapel, the Cathedral and most of the monasteries and palaces of the nobility. We lost a lot of our music; for example, the whole of the music library established by King John IV in the 17th century. He himself was a composer and had created the richest music library in Europe. We know that because part of the catalogue survived. He had decided to publish the catalogue, so we know how much music was in the library. It was incredible because, besides thousands of works by Portuguese composers or composers working in Portugal, he was very interested in everything going on in Europe at the same time, collecting music from England and Poland, not to mention works from Italy and France (more standard repertoire). This explains why we have some restrictions to our repertoire. Our sacred repertoire is huge, because we had music libraries in all the cathedrals and old monasteries. Of course, many of these volumes were lost in the 19th century due to the huge persecution of the Catholic church in Portugal which culminated in the 1834 suppression of the religious orders. I have realized there are still a lot of things to discover, a lot to be done. Many of these archives are now being explored. We vaguely know what they contain, but not precisely. This music needs to be studied, transcribed and performed. What has generally happened until very recently is that Portuguese performers (again, because of this lack of belief in the quality of our heritage) have not been the best "defenders" of our own repertoire. Amazingly, the few recordings you will find of Portuguese Renaissance- or Baroque music up to the early 21st century are by foreign groups. As to my generation, let's say, we as performers want to be more aware of this repertoire, of this patrimony, and to defend it. For me, it has become essential. And I’m very happy to do it now, not only with my own group, but together with other outstanding, specialized Portuguese groups, such as Ensemble Bonne Corde (director: Diana Vinagre) and Real Câmara Baroque Orchestra (director: Marta Vicente, and with Enrico Onofri as its main conductor) with whom we have already performed and recorded a vast amount of Portuguese Early Music from the 17th and 18th century.

 

PH: Would you please outline some unique features of Portuguese music?  

 

FMJ: Yes. Something very interesting about Portuguese music history is that, because the country was small but at the same time quite important in our connections with the discoveries with Brazil, with India and Africa, we have always been a melting pot, a meeting point between Europe and all the extra-European worlds. (I have just performed some Portuguese music that has African influences - African rhythms; even the text imitates the pronunciation of the black people in Portugal in the 16th- and 17th centuries.) So we have this exotic side, let's say, but we also have always had an interesting and strong musical relationship with Italy, especially in the 18th century, because our King John V was absolutely obsessed with Italy and Rome, mostly for political reasons, but also for artistic reasons. Imported art forms have been important in modernising the country and adding cosmopolitan aspects to Portuguese culture. I am very interested in Portuguese music per se, not just in music written by Portuguese composers, but also in music related to Portugal - music by Italian or Spanish composers who had lived in Portugal, by Portuguese composers who travelled or studied abroad, composers who made their careers abroad, also in Portuguese works you can find in German or Italian libraries. I have always been interested in these ties and do not restrict myself to any one nationalistic view. In the end, it's not where you were born that makes you Portuguese or not - it's your contact with Portuguese culture, the language, etc. I don't want to create the impression that nothing is being done about researching Portuguese music. There are some very good Portuguese and foreign musicologists doing amazing work on this history and repertoire and I feel I need to contribute to that. 

 

PH: What was the subject of your PhD?

 

FMJ: My PhD was on the Neapolitan composer-singer-poet Antonio Tedeschi, a very interesting person and absolutely unknown. I first discovered him because he was writing opera librettos for a "real" Portuguese composer called Francisco António de Almeida, who was the first opera composer in Portugal. I was transcribing one of Almeida's pieces and I saw that the poet was Antonio Tedeschi. I then discovered that Tedeschi was also a composer and a singer in the Royal Chapel. I discovered 86 compositions of his in total. It was very challenging to study this person, of whom nobody knew anything. I did research in Naples, in Aversa, in Rome and, of course, in Portugal, in order to discover who this person was, to study his music and understand his influences and style, thus adding another brick to the construction of Portuguese music history.

 

PH: Miguel, on what are you focusing at the moment?

 

FMJ: I am busy with many things. I am working on 18th-century instrumental music, sacred and vocal music and, of course, keyboard music.  My recent CD is dedicated to some works of Manuel Rodrigues Coelho, a composer from 17th century Portugal. In 1620, he published a collection for keyboard instruments (organ, harpsichord, clavichord) and harp. A huge, expensive publication, it included some free works referred to as "tento" (an Iberian form close to the ricercar or fantasia). He wrote 24 of these big keyboard fantasies. The other part of the book consists of liturgical music. He also composed some beautiful variations on Orlando di Lasso's "Susanne un jour". Coelho's collection was dedicated to Philip III, the Portuguese king of the time (he was also king of Spain). An exact contemporary of Frescobaldi, of Sweelinck, of William Bird, Coelho wrote amazing music. I don't understand why this music is not better known or why it is not a regular part of programs. It is as good as any repertoire of these other composers. He certainly deserves to be better known. My CD is part of a collection that encompasses the complete works of this composer, and was recorded by different Portuguese musicians - on harpsichord, organ, clavichord and harp, a rare example of collaboration between different artists.

 

PH: I am interested to hear about the Ludovice Ensemble.

 

FMJ: This is the group I created when I returned to Portugal. I always explain that I didn't feel the urge to create my own group. I had just finished my studies, was interested in performing with different groups and thought I might form my own group after becoming "older and wiser". But I quickly realized that in Portugal the early music scene was very small and the level of performance very low. I had come from the Netherlands, where the level was amazingly high. I realized that once you moved back to Portugal, you ceased to exist! Geographically, we are not in the centre of Europe and, mentally, we are very far away. We don't exist for northern European festivals. The few Portuguese performers who want to be successful must move away - to London, Paris or Switzerland. So, it became clear that I should start creating my own group and that is how the Ludovice Ensemble came into existence. It started as a small chamber group - often a duo or a trio. It was created with my friend Joana Amorim, who is a traverso and recorder player. We started with- and still perform a lot of duos together (for flute and harpsichord: we play a lot of J. S. Bach, C. P. E. Bach, Graun, Couperin and other French composers), but we also wanted to do works with singers and other instrumentalists. Starting with German and French repertoire, we slowly moved to different repertoire and bigger works: we have performed the Monteverdi Vespers, oratorios of Alessandro Scarlatti, full operas of Lully and Charpentier and large works of Handel and Bach. It's a very flexible group, so we do what we feel like, but, also in Portugal, we perform what we are asked to do. In principle, we never say no to a challenge unless it is music in which we really don't believe. And, of course, we have started to do a lot of Portuguese music. For Joana it is a pity that there is not so much Portuguese music for flute, so she doesn't take part in all the projects we have. Our most recent recording, however, has some very interesting Portuguese music with traverso by Pedro António Avondano, one of our finest 18th century composers. As a group, we very much value our goal of service: we don't see ourselves as the main reason for what we do, but want to serve the public, to promote the heritage of Portuguese music and to present music which people in Portugal have never had the chance to hear. Last year, I discovered a beautiful oratorio by Gaetano Maria Schiassi, an Italian composer living in Portugal. An impresario, he came to Portugal to open and direct the first public opera theatre in Lisbon. We know this oratorio was composed here, although written for his native city, Bologna. We were so happy to perform this music for the first time. We love to perform these lesser-known composers, musicians on the fringe of the mainstream. Then, two weeks ago, I did a program of French Baroque music written for women's monasteries - music by Charpentier, Lully and Paolo Lorenzani (a little-known Italian composer who lived in France at the same time as Lully and Charpentier. He was court musician to Queen Maria Theresa.) These composers have all written music for female voices, music to be sung by nuns in the convents. I am not much into some of the newest trends, but we are aware, for instance, of the importance of music by women composers and the role of women in the construction of modern society. I belong to a research group which studies the role of women in Iberia (Portugal and Spain). Of course, we don't come across a lot of women composers, but there were women who were very important performers or sponsors of music, in particular, queens and ladies from the nobility. In October 2025, we will perform a concert of music that was written and performed by nuns in northern Italy, nuns living in convents around Milan, Brescia, Venice, etc. We like these challenges. We also love to play the big standards. Next year, for example, we are doing Bach's B minor Mass. 

 

PH: Do you produce editions?

 

FMJ: I have edited and transcribed thousands of pages for Ludovice concerts, and occasionally for other groups; many times, they are for first performances, but I have never found any editor who would be interested in publishing these pieces. When I retire, I think I will send a lot of this music to IMSLP, the website sharing public domain scores. You don't make money from it, but I have received so much great music from there, that it would be my way to pay back and share some of the music I have edited.

 

PH: Dare I ask you your views on the historical performance practice movement?

 

FMJ: Throughout my musical career, I have always been interested in historic performance practice and in things related to it. For me it's my life, my way of understanding music. I cannot understand music in a different way from the historical performance practice movement, even when I play contemporary music. My approach is to try to get as close as possible to the composer's intention, to know as much as possible about the context of the music. Of course, the older the music, the less we know.  The only way for me is to do research and exploration. But I must say that I don't like to "do archaeology" on stage: I like to collect as much information as possible, to get as close as possible to the style, and 99 per cent of the time that's what I need and it's more than enough. But, as a 21st-century musician, if it doesn't serve the music and the public, I am then ready to change it. Again, one thing is what a scholar/researcher must do and the other thing is what a performer must do. The performer should not be a slave to facts or of information, but to make real music. I tell my players that when we are on the stage. I don't want the audience to "listen to the score" but to feel moved - to cry, to laugh. I am quite conservative. In the early music world over the last 15 or 20 years, you have people going for crossover performances between early- and folk music, lots of percussion, inviting musicians from the world of jazz and world music to collaborate. I am not particularly fond of performances that combine, for example, a clarinet with a theorbo, claiming it is "historic" performance". That is not my vibe at all.  I'm a bit old-fashioned, but that doesn't mean that, if there is something clever that really serves the music, I would not accept the challenge of building these bridges between different musical worlds. For example, in 2022, we went to the Felicja Blumental Festival (Israel), where we were asked to create a kind of "panoramic" view of Portuguese music history. We presented music from the 12th- to the 21st centuries. Of course, when you do something like that, you cannot assume or tell people that you are doing everything historically correctly. To do that, I would have needed not just one harpsichord but maybe six - one for each time period. And, following that logic, a recorder player would not be able to play a 20th-century piece that was not written for the recorder. But the challenge was so interesting, and the concert was very good. We also added some folk music to give a fuller vision of Portuguese music, in which art music and folk music are so interconnected. For instance, in the late 18th- and early 19th centuries, there was a certain song genre called the "modinha", which developed simultaneously in Portugal and Brazil. It developed from so many different influences, like from folk songs and from African dances, so it was important for us to include this music. I am not against a good project that puts together world music and early music.  

 

PH: Do you teach?

 

FMJ: Not regularly…unfortunately. On my return to Portugal from the Netherlands, I did teach children for seven years but was not happy doing it. I love children and consider working with young people to bring them close to classical music very important. There are some children studying music not because they want to, but because their parents think it is "fancy".  I would love to teach on the academic level. In Portugal, there are very few schools that are interested in teaching serious historic performance practice. So, I teach through my group. In 2021, 2022 and 2024, we ran a summer academy project. It was for advanced students and young professionals, but we also had a program for 13- to 17-year-olds, in which they could have their first contact with Baroque instruments and Baroque performance practice. The course also included Baroque dance and Baroque theatre, because I see them all as existing together. We had daily concerts or recitals, so the young people could hear a lot of repertoires. We ended each course with a small but fully staged production: one year we did “Les Fontaines de Versailles”, a chamber opera by Michel Richard Delalande; another year we did Monteverdi's "Il ballo delle ingrate". What was very special was that the teachers always played together with the students, showing them how music is made, rather than just telling them how they should play. The staff also prepared the students for real situations - what to do if a violin string breaks in the middle of a concert, or if the reed of an oboe is not responding, etc. 

Here, in Portugal, I get invited to run some master classes - organ, harpsichord or musical interpretation. And in England, I regularly collaborate with a training programme for both young professionals and advanced amateurs at Benslow Music Centre (Hitchin, Hertfordshire), which offers teaching of historical performance practice in the fields of Baroque opera and oratorio, and again, not just music, but also dance and acting.  

 

PH: Would you like to mention something of your future plans?

 

FMJ: Yes. To keep surviving and doing what I love to do. Every day is a fight to get more concerts and to do what I believe is beautiful. I am a very pessimistic person, but I have future plans about which I am happy - the B minor Mass next year in Portugal; a French music concert at the prestigious Valletta Baroque Music Festival in Malta in 2027; a few other concerts and also some articles I am soon publishing for my research work, as well as seeing if there are some teaching opportunities. I am going to Brazil next week, which is exciting. It is the first time I will be crossing the Atlantic. We will be doing a program of Iberian dance music there, a project involving myself and three Baroque dancers. Again, combining music with other arts.

 

PH: When it's not music, what interests you?

 

FMJ: I don't know if it is because of my past in architecture, but I am very much into the visual arts, mostly Baroque art, and am always trying to further my knowledge in it. If I am not reading about music, I often read about Baroque painters, about perspective, visual rhetoric, about architecture - Bernini, Borromini, Guarini, etc., and about Portuguese art history. One of the articles I am soon publishing in Rome is cross-information on music and visual arts. I am also very passionate about reading religious history and about religion in general. The only physical activity I like is walking. I take long walks. I have done three different Santiago pilgrim walks. I like to go to the beach nearby. I also take care of my 90-year-old mother and there is my cat, Mimi. A typical Sunday afternoon will see my mother and me both on the sofa reading books, there will be some music playing in the background and Mimi, of course, will be present.

 

PH: Miguel, many thanks for your time and for sharing so much of your knowledge and musical experiences.