"The young Portuguese cellist Filipe Quaresma has feet in both the period-performance and contemporary music worlds, something that’s immediately evident in his precise, superbly articulated playing, full of passion yet often quite thoughtful, on this fine survey of five recent Portuguese pieces for solo cello. [...] ... Quaresma’s beautifully rounded, rich tone, as well as the disc’s close, resonant recorded sound, to superb effect. He’s silky-smooth in the work’s pensive epilogue and has immaculate control of dying phrases and sculpted harmonics. [...] It’s a fascinating collection of pieces, bound together by Quaresma’s incisive intellect and natural sense of drama." review by David Kettle, in The STRAD magazine (June 2015) "... Dès les premières minutes, on est empoigné par le jeu extrêmement sensible de Filipe Quaresma, et, ainsi guidés, on se lance à la découverte d’oeuvres qui allient avec bonheur essence mélodique, contenu émotionnel, et modernité respirant sans snobisme ni frilosité..." review by Sylviane Falcinelli in www.falcinelli.org, article "En traversant l’Europe du Nord au Sud" (June 2015) "In this excellent phonographic record Filipe Quaresma captured with remarkable musical maturity the essence of each work, combining interpretative subtlety, expressive depth and a perfect technical mastery of his instrument." review by Pedro M. Santos in "Público" Ipslon Magazine (January 2015) "In Antagonia, for solo cello, the first and second strings are tuned half a tone lower (A and D flat). This tuning divides the instrument in two contrasting fields: two perfct fifths separated by an augmented fourth that makes them “antagonistic”. This antagonism is transposed to every aspect of musical construction: there is one force trying to ascend and another one pushing down (or vice-versa), rhythmical characters opposing each other in expansions and contractions, and dynamic progressions in different directions. The work is divided into six parts: prologue (pesante), four variations (fuido, presto, allegretto, lento) and epilogue. In the introduction there is no theme but a structure that is transformed in tempi, textures and sonorities peculiar to each variation. In the epilogue there is a deformed condensation of all the previous sections: it is the non-resolution of an untransposable conflict. Its anguish is intensified by the dissonances of the scordatura, wich “repress” the natural tone of the cello. Written in Almoçageme in March 1990, it was first performed in Barcelona three months later, in a concert in memory of Jean Etienne Marie. It was recorded by the Czech and the Portuguese Broadcasting Companies, and selected by the jury of the International Society for Contemporary Music for the World Music Days that took place in Mexico City, in November 1993. It is dedicated to the Portuguese cellist Irene Lima." Alexandre Delgado "The composition of this piece, like all my music, is based on listening and spectral understanding of the sound phenomena, taking into account the acoustic properties of the musical instrument, which is the subject of research, leading to the abstract speculation on the compositional process. The piece is based on a defective spectrum on C (one octave below the C on the cello), in which only 11 partials (from the fundamental up to the 29th harmonic) are taken into consideration. From this defective spectrum I realized 8 micro-intervallic frequency shifts, resulting in a total of 9 sound aggregates. These aggregates have a slightly different intervallic structure between them, yet this small difference is of great importance - in terms of acoustics and perception it changes considerably the harmonicity / inharmonicity of the aggregates, what actually means being more consonant or less consonant in terms of perception. Each of these sound aggregates corresponds to a section of the piece. Although the sections succeed without interruption, some interludes and transitions are introduced here and there between them. There are also few sections, where some of the material presented earlier is reintroduced from a new perspective. Within each section, every aggregate is the subject of successive transpositions, yet retaining the same intervallic structure and also conforming to the base harmonic spectrum. These transpositions give origin to numerous melodic figurations, often in accelerando and appearing throughout the piece. The electronics operates primarily as a shadow or double of the acoustic instrument, blending with it, and extending its identity. Occasionally, it can also act as a counterpoint." Miguel Azguime, 29th July 2014 "Labirintho was written for the cellist Filipe Quaresma. The piece is clearly divided into two major parts recognizable by the change in tempo. The construction of this piece is centred on a theme that is constantly repeated and varied, resembling an obsession from which it can not escape (like in a maze)." Carlos Azevedo "One of the salient features of the work of Corte-Real has been its umbilical relationship with Portuguese culture and, above all, with its poetry. Poets that the composer has put to music or from whom has taken inspiration are already numerous: Pessoa, Pascoaes, Régio, Agostinho da Silva, Eugénio de Andrade or Florbela Espanca. The work Bicicleta do Poeta (The Poet’s Bicycle) (2014) for solo cello, is inspired by the poem Bicicleta (Bicycle) by Herberto Hélder. As in the poem, the music is full of sudden changes of speed and pace, unpredictable changes of direction and hard braking. The calm, relaxed, summer’s-day ride itself gives way to the speed and vertigo inside..." Afonso Miranda "Ostinati (2010) represents a change of direction in the composer's work: a turn that incorporates previously rejected elements, guided under a greater freedom, in the sense that it suffers less from the denial of material and solutions than from the meeting of musically sufficient ideas in order to create one sound identity. The material found in the origin of the score is, therefore, quite concise. Like other works from Ricardo Ribeiro, if the thought associated to the electronic processing is present since the first moment, it is true that the instrumental part lives by itself as an autonomous piece. This phenomenon doesn’t work both ways: the electronic is only possible as a factor that improves the original idea, sometimes even recreating it, according to the notes which date from the elaboration of the instrumental part. The idea that each performance consists in a unique piece is, in Ostinati, taken a step further, since the electronic program was designed with some characteristics of randomness concerning to the degree of microtonality's range and overlapping of elements closer or furthest in time, which can be triggered in certain sections. The same electronic works as an orchestration of a particella, adding the microtonality and enhancing the timbre. The persistence of ideas and gestures is a metaphor of the idea of repetition, a presence that is increasingly evident in the last works of the composer. The repetition that in Intensités (2001) happened at the harmonic level, is present in Ostinati at a much more immediate level, in the movement, in the heights, in the continuous manifestation of strength which simultaneously transmits serenity." Diana Ferreira