On Music
SIMON, JOHN
On Music The Other Brazilian By John Simon If you have stocked up on recordings of Heitor Villa-Lobos, but haven't sated your appetite for the insinuating melodies and incandescent...
...The Concertino is the consummation of Guarnieri's striving for truly Brazilian music with nevertheless a neoclassical infrastructure...
...Whom their five daughters were named after we are not told...
...Like so many composers both North and South American, Guarnieri needed that finishing touch only Europe could bestow...
...The second, Saudoso (longingly), is a bit mopey, with the drums remaining silent...
...The third movement, Allegro, a classical rondo, is based on different Brazilian dance forms: A frevo (sparkly) and modinha (somber), alternating, are joined by a lively embolada (backwoodsman's dance), like the one that formed the climax of Guarnieri's 1932 opera...
...the second has a single melody, initially stated by the English horn and working its way through the entire orchestra...
...Well, Guarnieri's father, a Sicilian barber who immigrated to Brazil, was an amateur flautist and his mother, a native, was an amateur pianist...
...They are graceful yet not lightweight little gems, ranging from Grandioso to Desconsolado, from Intimo to Torturado, always equally fetching...
...Meanwhile he supported himself by playing piano at a music shop during the day and at a movie theater in the evenings...
...What couldhavebeenmore indigenous...
...But he was not just a homeboy...
...The symphony won first prize in a competition to commemorate Sâo Paulo's 400th anniversary in 1954...
...This must end...
...Further, he was able to hear the music of Bartok and other moderns...
...He conducted, too, but the orchestra is left annoyingly unidentified...
...Next on the CD is Chôro (1956...
...Despite native elements, neoclassicism preponderates to strikingly idiosyncratic effect, revealing the composer at his most sophisticated...
...Shortly before the Third Symphony, he had written a combative open letter warning the country's musicians and critics against unwelcome foreign influences—i.e...
...Its opening and closing movements are based on sonata form...
...All are exquisitely sung by Olga Maria Schroeter, with Velina Richter at the piano...
...Based on three native dances, it exudes wonderfully Amerindian verve, its scoring including several exotic instruments...
...With the new symphony, dedicated to his former teacher Lamberto Baldi, he backed up his words...
...This 11-minute work is available on BIS 1220...
...1 for Violin and Piano (1939), an early work of overwhelming sweetness...
...Camargo wrote his first opera, Pedro Malasorte (1932), with his mentor Andrade as librettist...
...intensely syncopated, it is indeed energetic...
...The Homage to Villa-Lobos (1966) is performed by 36 players from Radio Mexico's National Symphony Orchestra, and provocatively excludes strings...
...The musical style, as Gerard Béhague has observed, "is sober and pictorial, without the grandiloquence usually associated with opera, [using] melodic and rhythmic elements with instrumental coloring reminiscent of Brazilian popular music...
...The amusing story concerns an odd little triangle wherein the hero, a roguish mestizo, refuses to let his wouldbe mistress run off with him, but takes a tidy sum from her good-natured, naïve husband in exchange for a marvelous allegedly talking cat...
...The father recognized the talent of his "little Mozart" and, although impoverished, moved the family to Sào Paulo, where the boy could study piano with two competent teachers: Emani Braga and Antonio de Sa Pereira...
...Finally, piano and orchestra share the melody as it slowly dissolves into a mournful coda...
...2, Uirapuru (1945), atribute to Villa-Lobos, who composed both the tone poem Uirapuru (1917) and a choral piece (1944) celebrating this Amazonian bird...
...In the closing movement, Decidido, the mourning theme undergoes numerous permutations—solemn, rambunctious, even raucous...
...Throughout the firstmovement, stately threnody and staccato birdcall spell each other—consider it human mortality versus the immortality of nature...
...Chams—the word derives from the verb to weep—were a type of music played by small ensembles of itinerant urban serenaders on guitars, flutes and drums...
...For a while Camargo concentrated on the piano, but once at the conservatory, under the influence of the Italian-born conductor Lamberto Baldi and the important critic-pedagogue Mario de Andrade, he branched out into composing in various genres...
...Koechlin's books on polyphony and counterpoint delighted Camargo...
...Most interestingly, a melody and rhythm from a brassy, percussive passage will be taken over by the strings and woodwinds in a high register, resulting in a piquant sameness with a difference...
...Guarnieri's three-movement symphony, somewhat differently, avoids reproducing the bird's call...
...The melding of strings and percussion is emblematic: the most sentimental with the most explosive...
...It speaks well for the modesty—or self-assurance—of Camargo that he soon reduced the Mozart to M., which he kept until he felt established enough to drop that as well...
...By this time Guarnieri was a life member of the Brazilian Academy of Music and on his way to becoming Brazil's most prize-winning composer...
...In 193 8, upon the intercession of the great French pianist Alfred Cortot, Guarnieri got a scholarship for study in Paris, following the example 15 years earlier of VillaLobos...
...he also got counseling from the likes of Nadia Boulanger and the playwright-philosopher Gabriel Marcel...
...There follows a brief Canto No...
...This, in turn, gives way to a dignified sadness, serene in its fashion, but also, through a series of repeated long-held notes, achingly melancholy...
...Next is the Symphony No...
...Then, in a reversal, the orchestra becomes melodious and the piano rhythmic, with the drums now more discreet...
...Whatever Brazilian elements Guarnieri displayed, Koechlin would welcome...
...But there were more compelling reasons for choosing him...
...There is a sudden change of tempo, and piano and orchestra vie as to who can be jazzier...
...SYMPHONY No...
...another is Le Livre de la jungle, based on Kipling's Jungle Book...
...In a further reversal, the orchestra becomes even more soulful than the soloist...
...A remarkable work of Guarnieri's, the Concerto for Strings and Percussion, appears on Chandos 9804 as part of what is collectively titled Latin Impressions...
...The third section is all leaping and loping dance, the harmonies prodigally inventive...
...Injust over eight minutes, it is full of mischievous whimsy, splendidly realized by the composer's conducting...
...His music, Copland continued, is "the honest statement of how a man feels...
...On Music The Other Brazilian By John Simon If you have stocked up on recordings of Heitor Villa-Lobos, but haven't sated your appetite for the insinuating melodies and incandescent rhythms of Brazilian music, let me commend to you M. Camargo Guarnieri...
...The Viola and Piano Sonata of 1950 strikes me as less successful: effortfully ground out, though the middle movement...
...Charles Koechlin was wonderfully eccentric and very open to foreign, exotic sources of inspiration...
...The extraordinarily winning middle movement, Serenamente-Vivo, starts out with a much transformed version of the mourning theme, a lonely meditation voiced mostly by the oboe, that yields to a sprightly, teasing melody dominated by the flutes...
...has everything it takes—a personality of his own, a finished technique and a fecund imagination...
...besides, Koechlin had taught such distinguished pupils as Francis Poulenc, Germaine Tailleferre and Darius Milhaud...
...What, you may ask, does that initial M. stand for...
...As Flavio Silva has noted, Camargo passed through a French phase followed by an Italo-Spanish one, and then, guided by Andrade, he found his way to Brazilian folklore...
...In addition, Aaron Copland befriended him and described him as "the most exciting 'unknown' talent in South America,' who should be far better known...
...During the half year (1942-3) he spent here he won the Fleischer Music Collection Prize for his First Violin Concerto...
...Guarnieri's Chôro encompasses a comodo, nostalgico, and allegro, deft piano writing enveloped in orchestral harmonies of an often eerie, nocturnal mysteriousness...
...The first movement of this 13-and-a-half-minute concerto is marked Vigoroso...
...This is in effect a secondmovement, Afetuoso, but not without its aggressive patches...
...It proceeds attacca (without pause) from the first, with both piano and orchestra expressing the characteristic Brazilian longing, rising to a poignant climax, then subsiding into quiet nostalgia...
...Here exuberant drums engage in a dialogue with agilely dancing woodwinds, and samba rhythms are heard...
...Copland introduced Camargo to Serge Koussevitsky, who invited him to conduct his Abertura Concertante (1942), dedicated to Copland, with the Boston Symphony...
...There are climaxes and stillnesses, lettings off of steam followed by regainings of self-possession, concluding in firm resolve...
...The eight concluding ones (1959), included here and played by the composer, are wideranging mood pieces—some of them dedicated to his "last wife" (the booklet notes don't tell how many he had...
...Guarnieri] knows how to shape a form, how to orchestrate well, how to lead a bass line effectively...
...After France, the United States beckoned to him with an invitation from the State Department...
...Taken up by a percussion-driven, brass-heavy tutti, it becomes a vastly moving quasi-universal dirge...
...The first movement, Festivo, in sonata form, begins with a lilting melody on the piano and a more rhythmical orchestral accompaniment, the percussion supplying a steady beat...
...Guarnieri...
...It begins with the Second Piano Concerto, a 1946 prize-winner, conducted by the composer, with Eudóxia de Barros and the Orquestra Sinfònica Brasileira...
...Ponteios (Strummings) are 50 short piano pieces, from half a minute to three in duration, described by Guarnieri as "preludes of Brazilian character...
...A success when it finally reached the stage 20 years later in Rio's Teatro Municipal, it was a rare attempt at a distinctly national opera, depicting in a simple manner typical Brazilian figures...
...That was to transform him into an idiomatic, nationalist composer...
...Later he became permanent conductor of the Sào Paulo Symphony and acted as director of the Conservatory...
...Flavio Silva calls it "a fantastic dialogue...
...At last, the Teiru motif predominates, but in so festive a fashion as to make it less funereal than triumphal...
...They absorbed popular dances—schottische, maxixe, polka, samba—improvising freely with good counterpoint and syncopation in basically melancholy moods...
...I Can No Longer Hide That I Love You," while the fifth, "Promise," is much livelier...
...It was almost a political statement to base the first movement on Teiru, a dirge of the Pareci Indians from the Mato Grosso forthe accidental death of a chieftain...
...he studied in France and conducted in the United States and elsewhere...
...By this point Guamieri had directed Brazil's first modern music concerts, and taken over conducting duties at the newly established Sào Paulo Department of Culture...
...It is time to discover M. Camargo Guarnieri, with the M. not for Mozart but for Masterly...
...Ultimately, it reverts to the solitary, or near-solitary, lament, and dies away amid the hollow throbbing of muted drums...
...His misfortune is to have been unjustly overshadowed by his compatriot Villa-Lobos, like Avis by Hertz...
...Guarnieri's talent for balancing serenity with violence is evident from the opening movement, Lento-Energico e violento—energico, by the way, is one of his favorite procedures, sometimes masquerading as decidido or vigoroso...
...The one form he cautiously stayed away from was the symphony, but in due time he composed seven symphonies...
...At its finest, his is the fresh and racy music of a 'new' continent...
...Where, however, Guarnieri is fascinatingly different is in his chamber music...
...His gift is more orderly than that of Villa-Lobos, though nonetheless Brazilian...
...Villa-Lobos, in free adaptation, wrote a series of 14 Chores...
...unfortunately, the outbreak of World War II interrupted all this and drove Guarnieri back to Brazil...
...To learn more about conducting, Koechlin sent the young man to François Ruhlmann of the Paris Opera and to Charles Munch...
...12tone techniques—and stirred up the most creative musical controversy ever to hit Brazil...
...Scherzando, is not devoid of piquancy...
...Then a rendingly yearning cello theme enters, very much in the Bachianas brasileiras mode...
...For Latin Americans especially, France was the place of choice...
...The closing movement, Vivo, is a rondo that has two terrific themes in rhythmic and melodic alternation, then is joined by a third, scherzoso, leading up to a cheerful apotheosis...
...Since the 1920s, this forgotten music has been rediscovered by serious composers...
...One devoutly wishes it were available on CD...
...This melody runs through the entire three-movement composition, except for the first movement's second theme, inspired by a birdcall from Guarnieri's birthplace, rather like Villa-Lobos ' Uirapun'i...
...The second movement, Terno (tender), offers a wonderfully wistful melody that suggests enormous loneliness when played by the English horn, solo or with sparse accompaniment...
...to me, it sounds more like an outright winner...
...The third, Jocoso, is as jolly as can be, brimful of joie de vivre...
...The piece won second prize in the Symphony of the Americas Competition...
...The timpani get a tempestuous crescendo and decrescendo all to themselves, after which there is a brief, wry violin solo, followed by more fun-filled fiddling with vigorous percussion joining in...
...An ENCHANTING and invaluable disc is Guarnieri: A Brazilian Salute (Summit 249...
...A beguiling but hard to find Mexican CD, Repertòrio Ràdio Mec 8, contains quite a cross section of Guarneriana...
...On another Mexican label (Urtext 23), entitled Conciertosy Chôro, there is Guarnieri's 1961 Chôro for Cello and Orchestra, a lovely piece albeit a bit reminiscent of some others, a certain repetitiveness being the composer's only flaw...
...Marked energico e ritmando, it is in ABA form, with a zesty percussiondriven allegro yielding to a slow, pensive middle movement wherein strings and woodwinds predominate, before returning to the allegro with minor variations, and ending commandingly...
...besides the eldest, Mozart Camargo, there was a Bellini, a Rossini and a Verdi...
...Exchanges of rapidity and languor between soloist and orchestra follow, leading up to a combining of the first and third themes in what the booklet calls "a grandiose manner, as the piano plays brilliant cascades and octaves...
...Equally surprisingly, the piano switches to almost heartbreaking yearning, backed up by the now no less dolent orchestra...
...Guamieri also wrote some 200 songs, and five of them from 1954, to poems by his sister Alice, follow the concerto...
...Four are mostly full of the yearnings and sorrows of love, e.g...
...Twenty years Villa-Lobos' junior, Guarnieri was born in 1907 in Tietê outside Sâo Paulo, and died in Sào Paulo in 1993...
...But even the first movement slows down for quiet sections, sometimes for a mere solo instrument...
...Like two forces of nature, the primitive and the elaborate, attesting to human duality...
...Also on the disc are a piano Sonatina and the exotic Dansa Negra...
...Smartly, Guarnieri picked the most appropriate French composer to guide him...
...The first movement, Energico, fascinates by interweaving themes: Lulls or outbursts crop up in different sections of the orchestra with jolting unpredictability...
...The playing by I Musici de Montréal under Yuli Turovski is up to their usual high standard...
...By the mid-1930s Guarnieri was already a known composer-conductor whose works were performed in the concert halls of Rio de Janeiro and Sào Paulo, and he was hatching an opera project...
...Finally, the dialogue returns, more elaborately orchestrated...
...The second movement, Tristonho (sadly), is again in folk idiom, this time in a melancholy mode...
...The first movement, Decidido, stays just this side of blustery with variations on an Amerindian theme...
...That the date of composition is unknown is unsurprising from a composer whose oeuvre comprises over 700 items...
...It has a splendid contribution from the bassoon and trickier harmonies, concluding in a joyous outburst...
...Further, six Ponteios, magisterially played, like all the piano parts, by the distinguished Brazilian virtuoso Caio Pagano...
...the martellato piano playing soon yields to a bluesy theme, bittersweetly reminiscent of Gershwin...
...Marco Polo 223703 and 223885 offer the complete violin sonatas, dating from 1933 to '78...
...As in the following pieces on this fine recording, the Sâo Paulo Symphony Orchestra under John Neschling performs with exemplary dynamic and rhythmic shadings in this tricky music...
...3 of 1952 arrived in a climate of great expectation...
...Their four sons were named after composers...
...The third movement, Festivo, is most obviously Villa-Lobosesque...
...His heart and music did belong to his homeland, though, and it resonates through most of his mature work...
...One of his best-known compositions is the Persianinfluenced Les Letti-es Persanes...
...It starts with the irresistible Concertino for Pianoand Chamber Orchestra (1961), a summit achievement indeed...
Vol. 86 • July 2003 • No. 4
