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.

Tropical Baroque from Madeira

 

António Pereira da Costa: Concerti Grossi

There is only a single surviving published work of the Portuguese composer António Pereira da Costa: a set of 12 concerti grossi published in London in 1741. Pereira da Costa was the Chapel Master of the Cathedral in Funchal, Madeira.

I don't imagine there are many composers who are known for only a single work, but the six concertos from Pereira da Costa's Opus 1 recorded here by Ensemble Bonne Corde under the direction of Diana Vinagre show a master of taste, wit and style.  These concertos follow the model of Arcangelo Corelli, as so many works from the period do, but there is a true originality in his musical voice. The middle of the 18th century is probably the most likely place to come across truly fine composers who are completely unknown, at least partly because there is a real International Style in place that includes not only the musical centres of Europe - Paris, London, Venice - but also the far-flung edges of the musical world. 

Madeira is closer to Lisbon - the centre of the Portuguese variant of the International Style - than the thriving musical culture of Brazil, though one can think of the New World culture of the Portuguese empire beginning on the island nearly 1,000 km. from Lisbon. Indeed, the fine liner notes by Fernando Miguel Jalôto refer to Pereira da Costa's music as "tropical Baroque". I'm not sure exactly what this means, but perhaps there's a tendency for the music to show a bit more flair and individuality, away from the homogenizing effects of big-city tastemakers. Though there were no indigenous people living there when it was discovered by Portuguese sailors in 1419, it was on Madeira that enslaved people were first used in the sugar industry, and perhaps the rhythms of West Africa might have influenced the composer in a small way. But there aren't the same cross-cultural influences here that one finds in the music of the Iberian New World.

These six concertos were recorded in October 2021 in Lisbon. There's no indication in the documentation that the remaining six were recorded at the same time, but I'm certainly hoping that was the case. A second volume of this wonderful Opus 1 would certainly be welcome!

Postscript: 

I was this close to entitling this review of "One Hit Wonder" Pereira da Costa's single work "That Thing You Do". And this video would be required: