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.