The concert series “Sounds of Other Times” aims to present early music concerts performed on period instruments, rediscovering historically informed interpretations with a strong pedagogical and informative character. Each program also seeks to uncover the history of the country from which the featured repertoire originates. In its first two editions (2023 and 2024), “Sounds of Other Times” partnered with the ensemble O Bando de Surunyo, led by Hugo Sanches.

In 2023, the group explored Iberian repertoire under the theme “Music and Celebration in Portugal at the Dawn of the Modern Era.”

In 2024, the ensemble embarked on a collaborative adventure with Escola da Noite and Teatro Gil Vicente to stage “Frágua do Amor” by Gil Vicente.

“Música e Festa em Portugal no alvor da Era Moderna”

During the 16th and 17th centuries, the Iberian Peninsula displayed an extraordinarily rich cultural landscape with unique characteristics within the European panorama. Portugal and the territories that today politically constitute Spain shared a unity in poetic, musical, and theatrical production that endured for more than two centuries, despite various moments of political conflict and rupture. In this period, people, texts, and music circulated freely and intensively throughout the peninsula, giving rise to one of the most remarkable eras in European cultural history — the Golden Age — in which music, festivity, politics, theatre, and devotion merged in singular and surprising ways.

O Bando de Surunyo is an early music ensemble dedicated to the study, recovery, interpretation, and dissemination of this extraordinarily rich heritage. Grounded in musicological, historical, and philological research carried out within the Center for Classical and Humanistic Studies at the University of Coimbra, the ensemble has performed dozens of concerts both nationally and internationally, focusing on unpublished or little-known Iberian repertoire that stands comfortably alongside the finest contemporary musical production from the rest of Europe.