Defining a NATION

The Goiás Philharmonic Orchestra performs Cláudio Santoro’s Seventh Symphony at Palácio Itamaraty in Brasília. The ensemble’s recording of the work is due to be released on Naxos’s new Music of Brazil series

COURTESY MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS, BRAZIL

Brazil is an old country, with a history as changeable as its climate, as rich as its gold mines and as variegated as its plant life. In some respects, Italy and Germany, for example, are much younger, having arrived at their present unified identity less than a century and a half ago. But in the matter of music as a naturally social action as opposed to music as an actively cultivated pursuit, European nations lay claim to a much longer lineage.

So much of what ‘we’ – with English-speaking, European and North American mindsets – regard as Brazilian music is comparatively recent in origin, and our understanding of it commensurately shallow. For string players, pernambuco is a wood, and a useful one, but for Brazilians the name covers an entire region of their country, nine million strong – and thousands of miles east of the Amazon, where the world’s horrified gaze is presently directed.

From the beginning of the 16th century, for around 400 years, Brazil was a nation of slaves and owners. And in the 18th century it was first the exploitation of gold, then coffee, then timber that drove Portuguese and Spanish investment in their colonial acquisition and built and populated cities such as those in the state of Minas Gerais. With those cities and their people came art music, of the kind we play on violins and pianos.

The Music of Brazil is the title for a new series of recordings issued by Naxos. So far, 20 volumes are scheduled, and many more are in the pipeline. You will find there no samba, no bossa nova – not even, for the time being, any Villa- Lobos. Indeed, ‘Beyond Villa-Lobos’ would be a handy subtitle for a project that should broaden and inform many minds: a prospect to gladden the heart of its prime mover, Gustavo de Sá. ‘The trouble is’, de Sá explained when I called him at his office at Itamaraty, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brazil, ‘that people tend to hear funky rhythms and percussion in Brazilian music even when it isn’t there. I was upset by a recent reissue of the Bachianas brasileiras conducted by Enrique Bátiz. It featured nos.1, 5 and 7.

These are the most solid and abstract of the cycle: no.7 is a large symphony, no.5 is the cello octet and no.1 has the fugue for strings. There is nothing overtly Brazilian about these pieces – they’re more intimately Brazilian; but a friend living abroad remarked to me that we nationals only understand how Brazilian these pieces sound once we’re overseas. But the inlay text advertised a “fusion” – which I hate – “of Bach’s music with the spontaneity of Brazilian style”. And this is such a misunderstanding. There is nothing exotic about these pieces. This is typical of a mentality that puts Brazilian music in a drawer. It’s a chapter of our story but it doesn’t tell the entire novel.’

THE MUSIC OF BRAZIL

The São Paulo Symphony Orchestra has earned recognition the world over

MARIANA GARCIA / OSESP

What part does string music play in that novel? ‘We have never looked at ourselves as a country with a strong string scene when it comes to building orchestras,’ replies de Sá. ‘Yet looking back on our history, we have produced a lot of good string music, which seems a contradiction.’ Indeed, violin sonatas fill the second volume of The Music of Brazil, composed by Leopoldo Miguéz (1850–1902) and Glauco Velásquez (1884–1914). Between them, these two figures represent the traffic of influence between Europe and Brazil. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Miguéz travelled to Europe for a music education, first in Porto then at the Paris Conservatoire, returning to Brazil’s then capital to head its newly founded National Institute of Music (NIM) between 1890 and 1902, and to bring the ambitions of Wagnerian opera before an ever-expanding bourgeoisie.

The case of Velásquez is more interesting still: born in Naples, the illegitimate son of the Portuguese baritone Eduardo Medina Ribas and Adelina Alambary Luz (from an important Rio family), he was moved to Rio as a 13-year-old, enrolled at the NIM (under the directorship of Miguéz) as a violinist and proceeded to compose with a facility and maturity far belying his years. He was part way through writing an opera, Soeur Béatrice, when tuberculosis killed him, but the best of his surviving output is concentrated in chamber music – not only the pair of violin sonatas released on Naxos but also a superbly wrought string quartet. This, too, has received a commercial recording, by the native Carlos Gomes Quartet – but the Selo Sesc label, which is the source for so many extant Brazilian recordings of classical and popular music, has yet to penetrate Europe beyond streaming services such as Spotify.

As de Sá acknowledges, however, these works all speak with a French accent. The first ‘nationalist’ composition was published in 1869 by Brasílio Itiberê da Cunha (1846–1913), an amateur musician and an accomplished pianist. His piano piece A sertaneja attempts to recreate in various ways the atmosphere of urban popular music, and quotes a characteristic popular tune. But a sea-change in the way Brazilian composers and musicians began to think of themselves was prompted by the multifaceted figure of Mário de Andrade (1893–1945).

A native of São Paulo born into some wealth, Andrade dedicated himself to a Western-style education centred on music, but his studies at the city’s conservatoire were cut short by the death of his younger brother in 1913, and the emotional impact left him with intermittently trembling hands. He turned from keyboard to pen and ink, inspired by his own close study of the French Symbolist poets, and to instruction in place of performance, becoming a professor of piano at the São Paulo Conservatoire in 1921. He was the prime mover behind the Week of Modern Art, which took place the following year, gathering writers and artists but also composers to São Paulo for what became a seminal exhibition in Brazil’s modern history, anticipating – and perhaps exceeding in its local impact – similar surveys in Paris and London later that decade.

Andrade’s thinking developed and matured in the 1920s and 30s, at the beginning of an era broadly defined as Brazil’s national-populist period – a time of social change 0c.

’WE HAVE NEVER SEEN OURSELVES AS A COUNTRY WITH A STRONG STRING SCENE, BUT WE HAVE PRODUCED A LOT OF GOOD STRING MUSIC’ – GUSTAVO DE SÁ

BRAZIL’S ORCHESTRAS

Goiás Philharmonic Orchestra principal conductor Neil Thomson has worked hard at ‘taking the edges off’ the ensemble’s string sound

Goiás Philharmonic Orchestra principal conductor Neil Thomson talks about their differences

The city of Goiânia is like the Nashville of Brazil – it’s the home of country music. When I came here six years ago, I found an orchestra that was pretty raw in terms of sound and ensemble. We had to work hard at taking the edges off the sound. String players in Brazil bring a fantastic energy and positive attitude to their playing but they tend to press the bow into the string, so we worked on how to draw the sound out of the instrument, how to release it. In the culture of classical music in Brazil – not in the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (OSESP) or the Minas Gerais Philharmonic, which are of international standard – there has been a tendency to ‘watch the maestro’, which produces 50 different ideas of where to place the beat. It took me three or four years to get the musicians to play as though they were playing chamber music, and chamber music isn’t a high priority for students in Brazil.

In Goiânia we have a Suzuki school, but individual teachers have made more of a difference. Elisa Fukuda is a Japanese teacher who has lived in Brazil for many years, and she has been responsible for turning out some of the best of the country’s violinists. She teaches Guido Sant’Anna, the teenager who took sixth prize at the 2018 Menuhin Competition. The picture is spotty – even up in Belém there are teachers who studied at Juilliard.

There are no conservatoires as such: the music departments of the major universities have performance courses, but OSESP offers the highest level of training in Brazil. It has an annual academy programme which takes on 20 students. They have lessons with the orchestral principals and play within the orchestra. And apart from Elisa Fukuda, Emmanuele Baldini has had the biggest influence on the refinement and the quality of violin playing in the country. As a concertmaster of OSESP he has been an extremely positive role model for violinists both musically and as a person: showing younger violinists that a leader doesn’t have to be the person who plays louder than the rest of the section. When I arrived, violinists came into the orchestra thinking that to play loudly and with confidence was the most important quality.

Cultures never emerge fully formed, and so although native artists and composers were increasingly promoting the possibility of a distinctively Brazilian strain of expression, they did so inspired above all by Parisian models – the poet Arthur Rimbaud in the case of Andrade, Debussy in the case of composers such as Miguéz and Velásquez (try the seductive piano introduction to the finale of Velásquez’s First Violin Sonata (Delírio), or the more chromatic, Franckian harmonies explored by Miguéz in his Violin Sonata’s Andante espressivo). Comparable to Ivan Sollertinsky in Soviet Russia, Andrade urged composers around him to absorb the latest trends emerging from Europe and yet speak and sing in distinctively Brazilian tones. Just as Shostakovich studied Mahler and Berg under Sollertinsky’s influence, Francisco Mignone (1897–1986), Camargo Guarnieri (1907–93), José Siqueira (1907–85) and Edino Krieger (b.1928) were guided by Andrade towards an indigenous idiom comparable to the work of contemporaries such as Vaughan Williams, Bartók and Prokofiev.

Such an idiom was expressed symphonically above all. Brazilian people still regard chamber music as a product of European culture, de Sá explains to me: ‘Orchestral music has a deeper resonance here. There is something about a mass of musicians that is typical of Brazilian culture, such as drumming groups, with tens and even hundreds of musicians, which look more like an orchestra than a piano trio. And then there are team sports, which are much more popular than individual sports such as athletics or gymnastics. We have always been more drawn to one collective looking at the performance of another. So people connect better and more easily with orchestras. This is interesting for a country that has had a very weak history of orchestral culture until recently, not least because Brazilian composers have been writing so much orchestral music!’

The Music of Brazil project centres on new (and in most cases, premiere) recordings of that orchestral music by three Brazilian ensembles. The first is the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra (OSESP), which has become well known to listeners worldwide thanks to international recording contracts and relationships with conductors such as Frank Shipway and Marin Alsop. One of its present leaders is Emmanuele Baldini (below), soloist on the Naxos album of violin sonatas. The other two orchestras are based in the states of Minas Gerais and Goiás. North of São Paulo and Rio, Minas Gerais, home of the Minas Gerais Philharmonic Orchestra, is gold rush country, quite wealthy and populous, whereas neighbouring Goiás is a largely rural province: ‘the countryside of the countryside’, in de Sá’s words (we might call it the back of beyond). ‘But in fact the Goiás Philharmonic Orchestra [OFG] has specialised in modern and contemporary music. They have given high-quality South American premieres of works by Boulez, Messiaen and Nono to enthralled audiences.’ The OFG’s music director is the British conductor (and former violinist) Neil Thomson (see box); among their YouTube videos is a gutsy and lucid account of Nielsen’s Second Symphony, and for Naxos they will make the first recorded cycle of the 14 symphonies by Cláudio Santoro (1919–89), which for de Sá is ‘the great discovery of the series’.

Thanks to the support of Itamaraty, which is ring-fenced from the rest of Brazil’s turbulent domestic politics, the orchestras incorporate this new and unfamiliar repertoire within their usual programming. De Sá explains: ‘Instead of Beethoven they are playing Guarnieri or Santoro. This means that the local profile of the project is heightened, too: the orchestra will rehearse a programme for a week, then play it in two or three concerts, and then take it into the recording studio. So local audiences get to hear these pieces, and the feedback has been very good. I started going to concerts in my late teens, about 25 years ago.

I remember a time when orchestras didn’t play much Brazilian music. But this has changed, and there’s now a feeling among Brazilian musicians that they have to play the music of their own country, especially chamber music. Most musicians see it as their duty. What’s the point of a Brazilian violinist recording Brahms for the millionth time?’

No mean composer himself (his work can be seen and heard on YouTube), de Sá is full of hope for the impact that The Music of Brazil will have on audiences at home and further afield – but he sounds a note of reserve about the future. Brazil attracts plenty of foreigners to direct and play in its orchestras, but music education ‘hasn’t flourished’. The NIM (now named the School of Music) has become part of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and there are other conservatoires in Brazil’s major cities, but of perhaps more lasting significance are the NGO education projects modelled on El Sistema in neighbouring Venezuela.

At the Instituto Baccarelli in São Paulo, supported by the likes of Volkswagen and Carrefour, thousands of children receive musical coaching based on Dalcroze principles. The Social Action for Music (Ação Social Pela Música do Brasil: ASMB) goes to the heart of Rio’s poorest districts with an agenda of social as well as musical education. From the Complexo do Alemão favelas north of the city comes the testimony of one mother: ‘I never imagined in my life that my children would play the violin, viola and cello, and would like that kind of instrument. It is a blessing to know that they already have a goal: they want to pursue a career. At school they have greatly improved their grades and their concentration is better. I am so proud to see them grow through music.’

For such children, stringed instruments are a lifeline but a slender one, largely unsupported by the state. According to de Sá, ‘The trouble is that there aren’t enough orchestral jobs to go around – all these initiatives produce good musicians, but where will they work? I hope that this recording initiative will help, if only to show that even what looks like a wild dream can come true. We don’t just like this music from a sense of patriotism: Brazil has a story to tell in classical music.’