Staring at the future of the past

Almeida Prado: Piano Trios; Cello Sonata, Balada

The Music of Brazil series from Naxos has been so important for the dissemination of the wonderful world of Brazilian classical music throughout the world. Here's another first class album, from one of the country's greatest composers since Heitor Villa-Lobos, played by three excellent instrumentalists.

Though José Antônio de Almeida Prado began his composing career in a Villa-Lobosian nationalist mode under the tutelage of Camargo Guarnieri, he soon latched on to the more progressive musical events in Europe. He studied with Gilberto Mendes, who had just returned to Brazil from Darmstadt, and was strongly influenced by the Polish composers Witold Lutosławski and Krzysztof Penderecki. In 1969 Almeida Prado moved to Europe, studying at Darmstadt under György Ligeti and Lukas Foss, and then in Paris as a pupil of Villa-Lobos's close friend Olivier Messiaen. At the same time, he worked with every modernist's favourite Parisian teacher, Nadia Boulanger.

It was while he was working with Boulanger during the summer of 1970 at the Château de Fontainebleau that Almeida Prado wrote his Trio de Fontainebleau, a wonderful work for piano, violin & cello. Almeida Prado would have known Villa-Lobos's Third Piano Trio, written in 1918, and one of the stars of Brazil's modernist coming out party, the Semana de Arte Moderna of 1922. Both Villa's and Almeida Prado's trios can trace their lineage to Maurice Ravel's landmark Piano Trio of 1914, with its rich textures and colouristic effects. By the way, the cover of the album shows a watercolour painting entitled "Nadia Boulanger", by Almeida Prado himself!

Almeida Prado's second piano trio, the Trio Marítimo, was written in 1983, and dedicated to the memory of the great Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. Each section of the work illustrates a poem from Pessoa's cycle Mensagem (Message), a conversation with Luís de Camões’ epic poem Os Lusíadas, which celebrated the voyages of discovery by Portuguese sailors (including, of course, Brazil).

1. The Fields

First / The Castles

Europe is lying propped upon her elbows:
From East to West she lies, staring
Out, reminiscent, – Greek eyes from the shelter
Of romantic hair.

Behind her back the left elbow is cast;
The right has the angle place.
That one says Italy in its repose;
This one says England where, gathered apart,
It holds the hand up to support the face.

She stares, her gaze doom-heavy, sphingical,
Out at the West, the future of the past.

The face with which she stares is Portugal.

(trans. Jonathan Griffin)

Almeida Prado's Cello Sonata was commissioned in 2003 by Sonia Rubinsky & Antonio Meneses, two of Brazil's greatest instrumentalists. It's played here, beautifully, by Rubinsky and Rafael Cesario. In this work Almeida Prado acknowledges his debt to Johannes Brahms, evident in its dense musical textures and formal architecture. The Balada for cello & piano which opens the recording is from 1985. The composer notes that it forms "a chromatic spiral where the accumulation of resonances creates a mystical aura," which connects it to much of Almeida Prado's oeuvre, especially his towering master work, the Cartas celestes for piano.

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.

Great piano music from Villa-Lobos

I posted this review of the 7th volume of Sonia Rubinsky's great cycle of the complete piano music of Villa-Lobos to The Villa-Lobos Magazine back in 2010. Here it is again, with a few updates.

The seventh volume in the series is my favourite, since it includes so many pieces I haven't heard before.  In 1932 Villa-Lobos made a piano version of his early orchestral score Amazonas, which was first published in 1917.  Like in the great Rudepoema of the early 1920s (which Villa-Lobos orchestrated in the same year, 1932, as the Amazonas reduction), there's a lot happening for only 10 fingers and 88 keys to manage at once.  It's interesting that Prof. Tarasti should say, about the Rudepoema orchestration: "... one can only be amazed at how 'orchestral' the piano work already is."  And, though you can't always un-scramble an egg, I find the piano version of the great Stravinsky-infused orchestral version of Amazonas quite pianistic.  I wonder how it was that Villa-Lobos was reducing and orchestrating these two big scores at the same time.  Was it a case of the always practical composer coincidentally needing different versions of these scores, or did he just decide one day to set himself these interestingly symmetrical tasks?

The transcriptions for piano of the Guitar Preludes by José Vieira Brandão provide another fascinating listening experience, and one which I found even more musically satisfying.  These five pieces are among the greatest in the guitar literature, and are the first Villa-Lobos works I heard (and, naturally, fell in love with).  They fit very well in their new piano guise, which is a tribute both to Brandão's re-thinking of the music for the piano, and Rubinsky's phrasing on the keyboard.  I thought the third Prelude, inspired by Bach, worked especially well on the piano.  James Melo, in his excellent liner notes, calls the Brandão transcriptions "true transcendental etudes for the piano."  They deserve to be taken up by more pianists, either as a group, or one at a time as a encores.  It's a good way to get this response: "I know this piece. What is it? It's by Villa-Lobos, but wait a minute! Something doesn't sound right!" [update: listening to these piano transcriptions again, I'm less positive about them. Not that they're unmusical or poorly played - perish the thought! - just that they're nowhere close to the guitar versions. This is heavenly music on six strings, and it's too far a fall in the piano version. I still agree that they should be taken up by pianists, since they're interesting in that form.]

In the 1940s Villa-Lobos transcribed the third movement of Bachianas Brasileiras #2 (not #3 - a typo in the liner notes) for piano.  Dedicated to Georgette Baptista, this version was never published (the score is in the Museu Villa-Lobos), and was first played by Cláudia Tolipan in London in 1990. It sounds a pretty slight piece on the piano.  It makes you want to hear a really good orchestra led by a really good conductor (let's say the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, conducted by Eduardo Mata).

The rest of the disc is filled with really interesting little bits, including some world premiere recordings.  I play Feliz aniversario from the Canções de Cordialidade every year on Villa-Lobos's birthday (March 5th), and Feliz Natal is always in my Christmas playlist as well.

The sound from this 2007 recording continues excellent, especially in the turbulent Amazonas.  I've read reviewers who prefer the bright sound of the later Paris recordings (6-8) to the softer sound provided by Kraft & Silver in their earlier Toronto ones (2-5).  But the whole series seems to me to place one in a realistic space, and Rubinsky does the rest!

Though you can buy the individual CDs in the set, the best way to buy this music is to get the boxed set. It's a great bargain.