Piano concertos from an important Brazilian

Almeida Prado: Piano Concerto no. 1; Aurora; Concerto Fribourgeois

The latest release in the marvellous Naxos series The Music of Brazil features the great composer José Antônio de Almeida Prado (1943-2010). One of the most important recording projects of Brazilian music in the past decade was Aleyson Scopel's survey of Almeida Prado's complete Cartas celestes for the Grand Piano label. Though these works were mainly for piano solo, there were three in the official series of 18 that added other instruments (#7 is for two pianos and symphonic band, #8 for violin and orchestra, and #11 for piano, marimba and vibraphone). As well, after he completed the first work in the series, in 1975, he wrote Aurora, for piano and orchestra, which he called an "unofficial Cartas celestes, because it’s not numbered in the same series, but does share the same universe, the same heart, the same élan." What a marvellous work this is, especially as well played as it is by Sonia Rubinsky, the pianist known to most of us as a Villa-Lobos specialist.

There are two other important works for piano and orchestra here: the Piano Concerto no. 1 is the only numbered piano concerto by Almeida Prado. It's a one-movement work from the early 1980s that takes a four-note motif and mashes it about in the Beethoven manner. Rubinsky's virtuosity is required, and in evidence, here, as are the Minas Gerais Philharmonic's players' considerable skills. Fabio Mechetti's task is to ensure both a steady pulse and a sense of coherence across a complex of shifting rhythms, timbres and other sound events.

My favourite piece, though, is the Concerto Fribourgeois, written in 1985 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Bach's birth. It's a post-modern take on neo-classicism, with appearances of musical guests both unlikely (Stockhausen, Messiaen and, once again, Beethoven) and likely (Bach himself, of course, including the famous B-A-C-H motif, but also Villa-Lobos in his Bachianas mode). This is as much fun listening to as it was, I am sure, to play. Bravo to these fine musicians, and to Naxos for this well-researched and beautifully recorded program.

Here's a short documentary on Almeida Prado from 2019, featuring Sonia Rubinsky and Fabio Mechetti.



This review is also posted at The Villa-Lobos Magazine.

This album will be released on May 8, 2020.

Music from the shadows

Alberto Nepomuceno: Symphony in G minor, Prelude to O Garatuja, Serie Brasileira

The Villa-Lobos Shadow in Brazilian classical music is wide, and long, and very dark. It reaches forward from the intimidating bulk of the great composer's works, but it also reaches into the past, obscuring the music of fine, or at least respectable, composers who went before. But now, to shine some light on composers in this shadow, we have an exciting new Naxos series called The Music of Brazil, made possible by the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs project Brasil em Concerto. We can look forward to more releases from the Minas Gerais Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as the Goiás Philharmonic Orchestra and the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (OSESP), from a label that has already done so much for Brazilian classical music.

Alberto Nepomuceno is a good composer to begin with: born twenty-three years before Villa-Lobos, he left behind his beginnings in the North-Eastern cities of Fortaleza and Recife for more sophisticated musical surroundings, first in Rio de Janeiro, and then for an extended stay in the European capitals of Rome, Berlin, Vienna and Paris. A progressive in politics as well as art, Nepomuceno worked tirelessly, often behind the scenes, on behalf of new trends in music, but it was Villa-Lobos who gained much of the credit as the foremost home-grown musical modernist. In a coup of self-promotion and clever branding, Villa-Lobos stood virtually alone as the representative of music at the Semana de Arte Moderna in São Paulo in 1922. At that point, unfortunately, Nepomuceno had been dead for nearly two years, though surely more room could be made in the story of avant garde Brazilian music for someone who had translated Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony into Portuguese in 1916, teaching it at his National Institute of Music.

Which brings us to the music on the present disc. There is lots of well-crafted, pleasant music here, substantial enough to make careful listening worth your while, with occasionally something special.  While I was re-listening to Nepomuceno's G minor Symphony I had a flash-back to some music I had heard earlier in the day on my car radio (on KING-FM), Johan Halvorsen's Symphony no. 1 in D minor. Both had a pleasing, light, Tchaikovskian sound, and I wasn't at all surprised to see that both composers were born in the same year, 1864, though the Brazilian symphony was written in 1893, thirty years before its Norwegian counterpart. It's the beautiful slow movement of this symphony which represents perhaps the peak of Nepomuceno's orchestral music, under the influence, I would guess, of music by composers such as Puccini and Leoncavallo, but prefiguring works by Elgar and Richard Strauss.

Fabio Mechetti and the Minas Gerais Philharmonic provide really excellent playing, with especially strong string sections. Their version of the G minor Symphony is vastly better than the other version I've heard, by the Orquestra Sinfonica Brasileira under Edoardo de Guarnieri from 1958. This is a strong start for the Naxos series, and I look forward to upcoming releases!

This disc will be released on February 8, 2019.