Almeida Siege Historical Ball 2026: “From the Ballroom to the Square”

Balls held in Portugal in the early nineteenth century took place during a period of significant sociocultural change. The number of musicians and musical instruments available was growing, and festivities and balls featured major group dances, such as contredanses, alongside musical pieces strongly influenced by operatic composition.

However, it was in certain aspects of the content and the types of festivities and balls that Portuguese salons differed from those elsewhere in Europe, with their prolific cultivation of more sentimental songs and canzonettas, as well as the use of cultural elements strongly influenced by contact with African peoples; (...)

Hundreds of publications and songbooks of modinhas have survived, along with thousands of handwritten examples of these songs, both in Portugal and Brazil. These works blend musical elements from Italian opera, popular musical traditions more closely associated with rural life, African and Brazilian rhythms, and dramatic elements from musical theatre. (...)

The success of these songs was so significant that Italian composers who visited Portugal during this period felt compelled to experiment with this “melting pot that is the musical genre of the modinha”. One example featured at this year’s ball was the soprano song Se tu m’ami se sospiri, whose accompaniment inevitably transports us to the musical world we associate with Lisbon fado. (...)

In 2026, the ball’s programme opened with the now-traditional polonaise, a dance that had been highly fashionable since the early eighteenth century, composed by Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778–1837). This was followed by a potpourri of European dances from the period, each with its own character, interspersed with semi-staged modinhas. The ball culminated in the contradança mandada, a true celebration of early nineteenth-century dance, illustrating the journey of these dances from the ballroom to the streets — in other words, to the people.

Providing the musical accompaniment for the ball, Concerto Ibérico brought together two solo singers, who performed the vocal pieces, and an instrumental ensemble distinguished by its use of plucked string instruments, including the harpsichord, Portuguese guitar and Baroque guitar. The flute and violin provided the higher melodic lines, while the bassoon and double bass supplied the ensemble’s lower register.

The musical accompaniment was performed by Concerto Ibérico, featuring Carolina André (soprano), Eduardo Portugal (baritone), Filipa Oliveira (flute), Luís Peres (violin), Vasco Cruz (Portuguese guitar), Pedro Martins (Baroque guitar), Hugues Kesteman (bassoon), Maria Delmar (double bass) and João Janeiro (harpsichord and musical direction).

Image reference:

Quadrilles. Third set, c. 1810–1820. Coloured engraving attributed to Robert Cruikshank. Collection of The New York Public Library, Jerome Robbins Dance Division.

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