João Domingos Bomtempo (1775-1842)
- Sinfonia em Ré maior, No.2 (c.1820)
Performers: Nova Filharmonia Portuguesa; AIvаro Cаssuto (conductor)
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Portuguese pianist and composer. Son of the Italian oboist F.X.
Bomtempo, who belonged to the royal chapel of Dom José I, he studied
music with his father and was a pupil at the Patriarchal Seminary. A
member of the brotherhood of St Cecilia from the age of 14, he replaced
his father in the royal chapel a few years later, after the latter’s
death in Brazil. But soon afterwards (1801) he left for Paris, where he
became well known as a pianist and composer: his first two piano
concertos and the Symphony no.1 were widely acclaimed in the Journal
général de la France and the Courrier de l’Europe. His meeting and
friendship with Clementi, who published many of his works, date from his
first years in Paris. Because of the Napoleonic invasions he left for
London in 1810, where he taught music to a daughter of the Duchess of
Hamilton for a year. He returned to Lisbon in 1811 but went back to
London five years later; in 1820, after another brief sojourn in Paris
during which he composed the Requiem Mass in memory of Camões, he
finally settled in Portugal. Besides teaching there he also organized
concerts; to this end he founded the Philharmonic Society which in
August 1822 initiated the first series of regular concerts in which
works by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were performed, as well as his own
compositions. The Vilafrancada movement and the advent of the absolutist
regime in 1828 interrupted the concerts and later led to the
dissolution of the society itself, but the triumph of liberalism finally
brought Bomtempo just reward for his abilities: in 1833 he was
appointed the teacher of Dona Maria II and awarded the Order of Christ,
and in 1835 he was made principal of the conservatory, which had been
inaugurated the same year. He kept this position to the end of his life.
Bomtempo was one of the principal reformers of Portuguese music, not
only through his establishment of the conservatory, but also through the
Philharmonic Society’s activities on behalf of instrumental, symphonic
and chamber music, in a milieu then completely dominated by Italian
opera. To Bomtempo also Portuguese music owes its first examples of
native symphonies, and chamber music.
