Traditional Christmas concert of 2025, by the Porto Cathedral Choir – “Um Natal Português”.

Porto Cathedral Choir will perform the work ‘Um Natal Português’ (A Portuguese Christmas) to celebrate Christmas with songs from our popular tradition, reviving the challenge launched in 2001 to four composers from Porto, who have been involved in various ways in the musical life of the city for many years: Carlos Azevedo, Fernando C. Lapa, Fernando Valente and Eugénio Amorim.

The performers will be the Porto Cathedral Choir, 1 mezzo-soprano (Ana Santos) and Maia Classical Orchestra, conducted by Maestro Tiago Ferreira.

In its kaleidoscopic succession of melodies, this piece is an extended fresco affirming the plurality of gestures and glances with which our people gaze upon the nativity scene.

These are melodies that many will recognise, from several Portuguese regions- Trás-os-Montes to Alentejo, Minho to Beiras or passing through Arouca - in a language of delicious expressions from our rich popular tradition, crossing the popular and the erudite, confronting genuine creative impulses with the sounds we all recognise, without nostalgia or constraints.

There are four composers and four different ways of seeing things. But despite the variety of expressions, we would prefer to understand it as a single piece, in four ‘movements’, in a choral symphonic translation of these simple popular melodies. The infant, of whom they all speak, is the eternal promise of the new, of utopia: ‘As long as a child is born, there is room for all hope.’