A serial beginning; a neo-romantic future

Guerra-Peixe: Symphonies no. 1 and 2; Nonet

Here's a welcome release in the "Music of Brazil" series from Naxos, a must for everyone interested in the classical music of that great country. It's their version of Mostly Mozart: Not Just Villa-Lobos. A few years ago I reviewed an earlier disc in the series that included music by César Guerra-Peixe, performed by the same forces on this album: The Goiás Philharmonic Orchestra under Neil Thomson, though this time we have two choirs added: the Goiânia Symphony Choir and the Goiás Youth Symphony Choir.

Guerra-Peixe was born, and died, about 30 years after Heitor Villa-Lobos; his music represents a major shift in the classical music of Brazil. After World War II, serialism came to the country in the person of Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, a pupil of Paul Hindemith. Guerra-Peixe and a number of his colleagues formed the forward-looking Música Viva group under Koellreutter's guidance.

By the 1940s Villa-Lobos, once the firebrand revolutionary who established new music in his home country - he was the only composer represented in the Semana de Arte Moderna in São Paulo in 1922 - now represented the musical establishment. Villa had moved away from modernism towards an idiom heavily inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach, tinged with folkloric content, a merger of African, European and Indigenous folk musics. Villa was firmly opposed to serialism, and never even dabbled in it, unlike modernist colleagues like Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland.

There are two works on this disc that represent Guerra-Peixe's serial period: the First Symphony, from 1945-46, and the Nonet, from 1945. The Symphony is a fine example of a serial work, severe and spiky; but still, this is quite accessible music. The Nonet is written for flute, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, violin, viola, cello and piano. Guerra-Peixe must have known Villa's Nonetto, written during his peak modernist phase in 1923, but the two works have little in common. That's partly a question of scope: Villa's interpretation of the number "9" was stretched to include a complete mixed choir (for up to 12 separate voices!), a large battery of percussion instruments, and the doubling of the flute with a piccolo, and the alto saxophone with a baritone sax. And the contrast in style is also clear: Guerra-Peixe's work is austere and inward-looking, but Villa's is, in a word sprawling. Villa's Nonetto is a great work, perhaps his greatest; Guerra-Peixe's Nonet is remarkable, a masterpiece, perhaps, but it seems like it was time for the young composer to move on.

Considering the controversy of Música Viva's reaction against Villa-Lobos in the 40s and 50s, it's a surprise that in the late 50s Guerra-Peixe should have made the same move that Villa made in the late 1930s, from modernism (Villa) or serialism (Guerra-Peixe) to nationalism through popular and folkloric music. It's perhaps no coincidence that Villa-Lobos died in 1959, and Guerra-Peixe's new tonal style came to fruition in his Symphony no. 2, "Brasilia".

The Brasilia Symphony is an out-and-out romantic work, fiercely nationalistic, and quite beautiful. The choral passages are stirring. With its modern new capital, Brazil was moving ahead, and it had a new generation of musicians leading the way: Santoro, Guarnieri, Mendes, Guerra-Peixe, as well as another Koellreuter pupil: Tom Jobim.

The wonderful cover art is Sol nascente, by Pablo Borges.

This album will be released on May 15, 2025.
 

Music from Santoro's Sixties

Claudio Santoro: Symphony no. 8, Cello Concerto

As one of the top Brazilian composers of the middle and late 20th century, Claudio Santoro stayed on top of the latest musical trends, but always kept an eye on the tradition created in part by Heitor Villa-Lobos, his Bachian, Brazilian forebear. More than 30 years younger than Villa-Lobos, Santoro spent time in Paris, studying with Nadia Boulanger, so Villa's modernism was absorbed at the source. Though Santoro ventured into atonality, under the influence of another teacher, Hans Joachim Koellreutter (who also taught Antônio Carlos Jobim), there are as many similarities between the two composers as there are differences. The split between the "Nationalists" and the "Serialists" that came about when Koellreutter started Musica Viva is in this case rather permeable.

This is especially apparent in the Cello Concerto, which Santoro wrote in 1961 (two years after Villa's death). The cello was Villa-Lobos's instrument, along with the guitar and piano, and he wrote a number of great cello concertos and other works featuring the instrument, which I'm sure Claudio Santoro knew well. Cellist Marina Martins gives a spirited performance of the work in this new recording from Naxos's estimable Music of Brazil series, with able support from the Goiás Philharmonic Orchestra. Though it was written in Berlin during a historic geopolitical crisis and amidst revolutionary musical changes, the Cello Concerto shows at least some remaining touches of Brasilidade, if not the full-scale national (and at that point conservative) sound of late Villa-Lobos.

Santoro's Symphony no. 8 comes from the following year, 1962, when Santoro was back in Brazil, teaching at the University of Brasilia. Symphonies loom larger in his oeuvre than in Villa's, and this work makes its mark through its intensity and depth of feeling. A vocalise in the second movement Andante - beautifully sung here by mezzo-soprano Denise de Freitas - hearkens back to Villa-Lobos's most famous work. It's supported by dark murmurings and ejaculations from the orchestra, and bookended by the similarly expressionistic first movement and a dramatic, rhythmically propulsive finale.

By 1966 Santoro was back in Berlin, where he wrote the Três Abstrações (Three Abstractions) for string orchestra. These are wonderful short character pieces - two or three minutes each - that make use of a serial technique to create alternating moods of mystery, dread, and, in the final piece, perhaps some hope for transcendance. By 1969 Santoro, who was not in the good books of the military dictatorship in Brazil, was at work in Paris, where he wrote his Interações Assintóticas (Asymptotic Interactions - a term taken from the current mathematical research of a physicist colleague of Santoro's). This is a very cool ten-minute work that makes use of quarter tones, beautifully coloured by Santoro's clever use of every instrument in a large orchestra. Olivier Messiaen once said that Heitor Villa-Lobos was the greatest orchestrator of the 20th century, and Claudio Santoro is carrying on this tradition. This is such an entertaining piece, and one that showcases a virtuoso orchestra in the Goias Philharmonic, under Neil Thomson.

By way of an encore, the disc ends with One Minute Play, a work from 1966. It's a tiny, clever, perpetual motion machine for strings, and it must be a great deal of fun to play. What a wonderful ending for a challenging but always interesting disc.

Orchestral music of a major Brazilian composer

César Guerra-Peixe: Symphonic Suites no. 1 & 3; Roda de Amigos

César Guerra-Peixe was born and died about 30 years after Heitor Villa-Lobos, and though he initially took a completely different tack, in the end he came to much the same musical place: a mix of folkloric and erudite strains, of indigenous Brazilian, African and European traditions. Like Villa, his mix of European avant garde and popular music sounds especially Brazilian. This character is brilliantly illustrated by the wonderful painting on the album cover: J. Borges's Forró Sertanejo, which shows a colourful, multi-ethnic mix of traditions of dance and instrumental music.

In the 1920s Villa-Lobos brought Brazilian music into the modernist world, but he later rejected serialism, which came to Brazil with Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, a student of Paul Hindemith and a refugee from Naziism. Guerra-Peixe studied with Koellreutter, and was a member of the "Musica Viva" group that promoted atonality. As with Villa-Lobos, the folkloric strain in Guerra-Peixe's music runs deep. But the progressive European strain - modernism for Villa, serialism for Guerra-Peixe - is never completely submerged. Both composers continue to blend both in their later music.

The two Symphonic Suites recorded here in this new release in the essential "Music of Brazil" series are both from 1955. The Symphonic Suite No. 1 ‘Paulista’ begins with an insistent phrase reminiscent of the beginning of Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras No. 1, from 1930. The work is full of dance rhythms gathered from folk tunes of São Paulo and the surrounding countryside. Guerra-Peixe has put together an appealing mix of mainly tonal dance tunes with the odd atonal passage for spice. The 2nd movement, Jongo, is an Afro-Brazilian dance that often reminds one of the music from the following decade written by Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass. The remarkable fourth movement, Tambu, is a moving liturgical procession that contrasts the brass and drums with intersessions from the strings. I was reminded of the Vorspeil: Concert of Angels from Mathis der Maler, written in 1932 by Guerra-Peixe's teacher's teacher Paul Hindemith.

By the way, in 1954, the year before Guerra-Peixe's first Symphonic Suite, Villa-Lobos had written his own symphonic tribute to São Paulo: his massive 10th Symphony, "Amerindia", for the 400th anniversary of the city's founding. However, I'm thinking that any similarities between the two works are more likely to come from a common source: Villa's own Bachianas Brasileiras suites from the 1930s and 40s. These are the source for so much of Brazil's music - both classical and popular - from then until today.

Guerra-Peixe's 2nd Symphonic Suite, "Pernambucana", uses the music of his second home, Recife and the surrounding area of Pernambuco. The music encapsulates the Carnaval de Pernambuco, with the dances of the North-East colourfully presented by a large orchestra with a large percussion component. The folkloric content has a sophisticated envelope: besides the large-scale Choros of Villa-Lobos, especially no. 6, completed in 1942, I hear echoes of Gershwin and Aaron Copland, as well as a host of Hollywood film composers. Guerra-Peixe was himself an active film-scorer; he has 19 composer credits at IMDb. Guerra-Peixe was much more open to jazz influences than Villa-Lobos ever was; the 2nd Symphonic Suite often has the sound of the American big band, and this music anticipates the Henry Mancini's music of the 60s.

The third work on the program is Roda de amigos, from 1979. The Roda is a group of musicians playing together in a circle; the amigos in this case are Guerra-Peixe's own friends. The composer creates pictures of each friend playing a woodwind instrument featured in the four movements: grumpy bassoon, stubborn clarinet, melancholy oboe and mischievous flute. So the work is a clever combination of Peter and the Wolf and the Enigma Variations.

These are all works designed for a large orchestra of virtuoso soloists and a conductor who can keep many plates spinning, mastering complex rhythms along the way. Neil Thomson manages everything with aplomb, and the Goias Philharmonic Orchestra is very much up to the task here. This is the tenth release in the Naxos Music of Brazil series, and it's providing yet another example of the many fine composers who have been in the Villa-Lobos shadow for too long.