Igreja Matriz

In Portuguese towns the igreja matriz is the mother church — the parish's principal building and, where no concert hall exists, its principal auditorium too. Fafe's stands in the Minho, in a town whose nineteenth-century prosperity came from textiles and from fortunes returned out of Brazil. Recitals there take the church as they find it: stone, a raised chancel, and an acoustic that flatters sustained wind and string writing far more than it flatters speech.