Talented Portuguese clarinetist Frederic Cardoso presents an outstanding new recording of Portuguese contemporary repertoire.
LUX ET UMBRA brings out world premieres avant-garde electroacoustic music for clarinet and electronics composed by young Portuguese composers dedicated to.
The universe of contemporary creation by young talents put into music by the interpretations of Frederic Cardoso, who masterfully records in this album an important legacy, from the present to the future.

FREDERIC CARDOSO won several awards in national and international competitions and dedicates a significant part of his work to chamber music and contemporary music. As a soloist or taking part of ensembles, he debuted around 130 works in Portugal, Germany, Belgium, Spain and Netherlands, being dedicated of many of them. In this context, he performed in Festivals such as: Cycle Estado da Nação (Casa da Música, Oporto), Festival Dias da Música Eletroacústica (Seia, Portugal), Mixtur Festival (Barcelona, Spain) and Donaueschingen Music Festival (Donaueschingen, Germany).

His discography includes albums on diverse areas as contemporary, classical, improvised, pop or world music. He collaborated with the Portuguese Symphonic Wind Band, Orchestra Estúdio Foundation, Orchestra Filarmonia das Beiras, Oporto Symphony Orchestra and Remix Ensemble Casa da Música. He was professor in improvement courses all around Portugal, and having presented a Forum on Portuguese Music for Clarinet and Electronics, as a guest professor, at the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp (Belgium).

Frederic has a Master degree in Artistic Interpretation from the ESMAE (Porto, Portugal), where he studied with António Saiote and Nuno Pinto, and a Master degree in Music Teaching from Minho University (Braga, Portugal). He is currently completing his PhD in Music – Interpretation Specialty at the University of Évora (Évora, Portugal), studying Wind Band Direction at the Portuguese Academy of Wind Band with conductor Paulo Martins, is an effective member of the Transmontana Symphonic Wind Band (bass clarinet and double bass clarinet), and is Professor of Clarinet and Wind Orchestra at the Music Conservatory of Paredes (Portugal). He is D’Addario Woodwinds Artist and Artway Showcase.

For Frederic Cardoso, one of the most talented young Portuguese classical music performers, the interest in the repertoire recorded on this new album "arose in a very important moment in my life, both musically and humanly. All the works have been composed as part of the recital Diálogo a Preto e Branco, presented at the opening of the Estado da Nação cycle at Casa da Música (2019). These works reflect not only the musical creation for clarinet of recent years in Portugal, but also the technical, aesthetic and technological multiplicity that the composer of today shows in the development of his creative-musical process. Lux et Umbra thus aims to be a sound portrait of our days, thus disseminating Portuguese contemporary music.”

The interpretative work on a repertoire such as this one was based on a constant collaboration between Frederic Cardoso and the different composers, as he himself underlines: "after the conclusion of the creativemusical process of each work, in which I was an active participant, it became essential to understand, from a global point of view, their musical discourse and, fundamentally, their sound. In this sense, being instrumentally explored in the most diverse ways, many of them through extended techniques, one of the main challenges proposed to me was to continue to discover the different types of clarinets from other sound perspectives, demanding a careful and refined virtuosity. At the same time, my approach was also influenced by the existence (or not) of interaction with electronics, challenging me to understand each piece as a whole, independently of its aesthetics or musical language."

As this is a very particular repertoire, even more so within the framework of young Portuguese composers and interpreters, for Frederic Cardoso the collaboration with the composers in the creative process "made me realise the great panoply of technical, musical and sonorous possibilities that music composed nowadays could offer me, thus motivating me to explore more and more different types the clarinet. I consider that besides today being required to the young interpreter to be increasingly versatile, forcing him to master all the extended techniques and other sonorities that can be performed instrumentally, his musical evolution will increase with the interaction between the performer and the young composer. This dichotomy is, in my opinion, the great challenge and stimulus of Portuguese contemporary music in the 21st century - to give and to receive, to create and to make known!”