Claudio Santoro (1919-1989)
Canto de Amor e Paz (1950)
Symphony No 4 ‘Sinfonia da Paz’ (1953-1954)
Choro Concertante for Tenor Saxophone and Orchestra (1951)
Symphony No 6 (1957-1958)
Fantasia for Violin and Orchestra (1959-1960/1980)
Pedro Bittencourt (saxophone), Emmanuele Baldini (violin)
Goiânia Symphony Choir & Goiás Philharmonic Orchestra/Neil Thomson
rec. 2018-23, Centro Cultural Oscar Niemeyer & Teatro Escola Basileu França, Goiânia, Brazil
Naxos 8.574572 [73]

Another month, another excellent release in the Naxos “Music of Brazil” series: the fourth disc in the ongoing survey of Claudio Santoro’s fourteen symphonies. With numbers 4 and 6 here, the half-way point has just been reached. Given my enthusiasm for this series, I am slightly at a loss to explain why I have not heard volumes one to three. But better to be late to board the Santoro Express than never get on at all. I am pleased – if not that surprised – to report the continuation of all the high standards of repertoire, performance and production in this ever-expanding survey. The performers are the stalwarts of this series: the Goiás Philharmonic Orchestra under their principal conductor Neil Thomson.

It is the first time I have listened to Santoro’s music, so I cannot judge how typical this programme is of his wider output. The CD cover describes the longest work here, Symphony No.4, as “one of his most accessible and influential works”. All five works, from 1950-1960, show a composer in confident command of the orchestra. According to the liner notes, in the late 1940s Santoro was aesthetically starting to rebel against the serialist strictures then prevailing in Brazilian contemporary music. A member of the Communist Party at that time, he was the Brazilian delegate at the 1948 International Congress of Composers and Music Critics in Prague. Their musical manifesto – follow national traditions to produce works that were accessible and could ‘educate the masses’ – appealed to Santoru, and influenced to some degree all the music here.

Recordings on the disc span nearly five years but there is an impressive consistency of playing and recording style. As on other discs in this series, I enjoy the playing of the Goiás Philharmonic Orchestra even if they may not be the most refined or tonally sophisticated ensemble. But they combine genuine virtuosity with individual and collective character and personality. The engineering is perhaps slightly close but very detailed and vibrant. All that seems to suit the personality of this music well.

The earliest piece, the ten-minute Canto de Amor e Paz for strings, embodies the ideal of direct simplicity of utterance. It is not that the music lacks complexity or is banal, but rather that it has clear musical and expressive intentions. The orchestra’s strengths work to good effect in the two impassioned climaxes in this piece. It deserves to be better known given its effective string writing and well-handled scale and form.

The liner notes say that Santoro was a life-long pacifist. That found its most popular and successful public expression in Symphony No.4 ‘Sinfonia da Paz’ [symphony of peace]. Written when East-West tensions were increasing, the work helped build Santoro’s international reputation especially in Eastern Europe. This twenty-four-minute three-movement work’s central section combines slow and scherzo movement roles in a broad slow-fast-slow structure. The final movement slightly unexpectedly includes a choir in a setting of Poema da Paz by Antonieta Dias de Moreas. Unfortunately, copyright prevents the sung text’s inclusion in the booklet, and I was unable to find it online either. The setting is in that mainly homophonic declamatory/heroic style beloved of Soviet composers praising the Motherland. That might well explain the warmth of the work’s reception in the USSR.

According to the notes, the first two movements have a degree of programmatic intent. The first represents “the people’s struggle for peace”, the second “the contrast between the joy of living and a reflection on life’s dramas”. I enjoyed the work a lot on first listen in blissful ignorance of this narrative.

Santoro shares a remarkable gift with many of his Latin American contemporaries: writing music of dynamic colour and energy, vibrantly orchestrated. These qualities are instantly apparent here, with a pulsating opening of kaleidoscopic rhythmic and instrumental variety. The upbeat sections are separated by quieter, more pensive passages before the movement ends powerfully. The reflective element carries forward into the second movement. The cor anglais begins with an extended beautifully played cantilena over a bed of hushed string chords. Not until around 5:45 (of the total 9:45) does the tempo increase and the central Allegro is reached, with an infectious supportive rhythm over a folk-like melody. This last barely a minute and a half before a return of the soulful melody initially on oboe and then impassioned strings, and then the movement fades into silence.

Santoro likened the last movement to a “joyful carnival parade, with people waving flags and banners”. There is fugato feel to the opening pages. Around the two minute mark it becomes an explicitly fugal passage, quickly interrupted by the first entry of the choir by 3:00. The choral writing is, as noted, relatively homophonic and declamatory, whilst the orchestral accompaniment is far more complex rhythmically and texturally. The choir is well balanced here but without even a summary of the text’s meaning it is hard to decipher quite the intention. The closing cries of “Paz!” give the work a suitably exultant conclusion.

I cannot fault the performance or the recording but I admit that the music itself did not sweep me away in the manner I am sure it can when you fully appreciate the context. This symphony appeared on the only BIS disc devoted to Santoro’s work performed by the ever excellent John Neschling and the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra and choir. I have not heard that disc but I would be surprised if it were anything but top-drawer.

Between this symphony and the shorter No.6 is the Choro Concertante for tenor saxophone and orchestra. This compact single-movement work of a little above eight minutes was conceived as a theme and set of free variations. Santoro wrote it around the time he was appointed to a post on Brazilian Radio. Indeed, the original score was marked “for radio”. This might explain his rather unforgivingly thick orchestration, which the tessitura of the tenor saxophone struggles to penetrate. The Naxos engineers’ solution is to highlight the excellent soloist in a slightly synthetic if pragmatic manner. This is another skilful work where Santoro finds an interesting balance between the modernist and the populist. The range of musical incident crammed into the brief time frame is engaging and impressive.

The same description can be applied to the compact Symphony No.6 whose four movements last just 18:40. The notes say that this is the shortest and most lightly scored of Santoro’s ‘Nationalist’ symphonies. So, there is an intriguing fusion of nationalism and a kind of neo-classical clarity. The very opening has moments of a Stravinsky-goes-to-Rio angularity which I rather like. This stylistic melding carries on into the second-movement Lento. Apart from a powerful climax around 2:10, it is notably more austere than anything else on this disc. In complete contrast, the 2:41 Scherzo is explicitly Nationalist. A wonderfully nagging ostinato figuration is handed around the orchestra in a slyly witty way. The closing Allegro, the symphony’s longest movement at 6:09, moves from a dynamically agitated opening through to an elusive sustained ppp chord. I enjoyed the Symphony No.4 overall, but I found the concision and focus of this work even more impressive.

According to the notes, Santoro made various attempts to write a full-blown concerto for his own instrument, the violin. From sketches for a concerto started in the early 1950s, he reworked the Fantasia for Violin and Orchestra which completes the disc. He only orchestrated it in 1980. Like the saxophone work, there is a compact single movement, but here we have a clear division: the opening Andante accelerates around the 4:00 mark into a virtuosic Allegro molto. The soloist Emmanuele Baldini impressed me greatly in Francisco Mignone’s Violin Concerto (review). This has more of the feel of a concerto in its virtuosic writing for the soloist, and Baldini again dispatches it brilliantly. The original work was written towards the end of Santoro’s Nationalist phase and orchestrated even later, so it may be no surprise that the work here is least explicit in it use of Brazilian folk idioms. They are absent or so refined as to be unrecognisable as such.

I enjoyed the range and style of Santoro’s music here, and it makes me want to visit the earlier releases. Each release in this valuable series incites a cumulative admiration not just for the range and quality of the compositions on offer by this group of Brazilian composers but a growing awareness of the rich collective cultural identity of the writers and indeed the performers. Each disc has proved to be valuable and enjoyable but somehow the overall quality of this ongoing series is even more remarkable.

Nick Barnard

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