Artistically breathtaking and engagingly intimate, the vocal music of the early Italian Baroque was an exercise in close artistic collaboration. Brazillian Counter-tenor Jose Lemos, along with GRAMMY® nominated harpsichordist Jory Vinikour, and theorbist Deborah Fox, three of the most renowned practitioners of historically-appropriate performance of Early Music and Baroque repertoires, the release of Io Vidi in Terra provides a rare immersion into a mysterious world that shaped almost every aspect of music as it blossomed in subsequent generations.

Born in Brazil, countertenor José Lemos pursued musical studies in the United States, where he earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Music from the College of Charleston (South Carolina) and a Master’s Degree in Opera Performance from the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Awarded Tanglewood Music Fellowships in both 2003 and 2004, his first operatic performances in the United States were in Robert Zuidam’s Rage d’Amours and Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Tanglewood. He also won both the First Prize and the Audience Prize at the 2003 International Baroque Singing Competition in Chimay, Belgium. From those beginnings, José’s operatic career has flourished with lauded appearances at Opernhaus Zürich as Nireno in Händel’s Giulio Cesare and Narcisco in the same composer’s Agrippina, both under the baton of Marc Minkowski; an extensive tour with Stefano Landi’s Il Sant’Alessio in a production with Les Arts Florissants and William Christie, to name just a few.