Nepomuceno Piano Music
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: Alberto Nepomuceno
Label: Marco Polo
Magazine Review Date: 2/1995
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 69
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: 8 223548
Tracks:
| Composition | Artist Credit |
|---|---|
| Suíte antiga |
Alberto Nepomuceno, Composer
Alberto Nepomuceno, Composer Maria Inês Guimanrães, Piano |
| (2) Nocturnes |
Alberto Nepomuceno, Composer
Alberto Nepomuceno, Composer Maria Inês Guimanrães, Piano |
| Improviso |
Alberto Nepomuceno, Composer
Alberto Nepomuceno, Composer Maria Inês Guimanrães, Piano |
| Piano Sonata |
Alberto Nepomuceno, Composer
Alberto Nepomuceno, Composer Maria Inês Guimanrães, Piano |
| Nocturne |
Alberto Nepomuceno, Composer
Alberto Nepomuceno, Composer Maria Inês Guimanrães, Piano |
| (4) peças lyricas, Movement: Galhofeira |
Alberto Nepomuceno, Composer
Alberto Nepomuceno, Composer Maria Inês Guimanrães, Piano |
| (5) pequenas peças (Five little pieces) |
Alberto Nepomuceno, Composer
Alberto Nepomuceno, Composer Maria Inês Guimanrães, Piano |
Author: Lionel Salter
Anyone seeking enlightenment from the current Gramophone Classical Catalogue in this country could be forgiven for conducting that Brazilian music began and ended with Villa-Lobos. Apart from arias from operas by Gomes, a few pieces by Guarnieri, tangos by Nazareth, a guitar sonata by Gnattali and one song by Ovalle, the country is otherwise unrepresented. But Villa-Lobos, despite his unorthodox and Bohemian musical education, owed a debt to his predecessors, of whom Alberto Nepomuceno was perhaps the most significant (he helped the young Villa-Lobos to find a publisher). With some justice, Nepomuceno may be termed the father of nationalist Brazilian music; but he was a highly cultivated musician who had studied in Rome, Berlin and Paris (where he was an organ pupil of Guilmant), had known Brahms and become a close friend of Grieg, was a teacher (and for a while, director) in the National Institute of Music in Rio and an enterprising conductor who championed his fellow-countrymen's works at home and abroad.
Of his very considerable output in nearly all categories of music we hear virtually nothing, and though these piano works, admirably written for the instrument as they are, may not rank among his major contributions they show him to have been a composer of a talent and technical assurance by no means to be ignored. The idiom of Cariocan popular music appears here only in Galhofeira (''Scherzo''), which employs the rhythm of the maxixe (which fascinated Milhaud in his Saudades do Brasil): for the rest, these works are romantic in idiom—Brahmsian in the rather hard-working Sonata (the first such work by a Brazilian composer), appealingly Schumannesque elsewhere. Exceptions are the Suite antiga, whose pastiche drew Grieg's admiration, and the Op. 33 Nocturne of 1907, which is more impressionistic and poetic. The Cinco pequenas pecas (''Five little pieces'') for left-hand were written for Nepomuceno's young daughter, who was born without a right arm but who, as the demanding and eloquent later (1919) Nocturnes illustrate, became a distinguished pianist.
Welcome as this disc is, a more imaginative and persuasive player might have been found for it than Guimaraes, who is certainly efficient but conspicuously wooden and lacking in subtle tonal nuance.'
Of his very considerable output in nearly all categories of music we hear virtually nothing, and though these piano works, admirably written for the instrument as they are, may not rank among his major contributions they show him to have been a composer of a talent and technical assurance by no means to be ignored. The idiom of Cariocan popular music appears here only in Galhofeira (''Scherzo''), which employs the rhythm of the maxixe (which fascinated Milhaud in his Saudades do Brasil): for the rest, these works are romantic in idiom—Brahmsian in the rather hard-working Sonata (the first such work by a Brazilian composer), appealingly Schumannesque elsewhere. Exceptions are the Suite antiga, whose pastiche drew Grieg's admiration, and the Op. 33 Nocturne of 1907, which is more impressionistic and poetic. The Cinco pequenas pecas (''Five little pieces'') for left-hand were written for Nepomuceno's young daughter, who was born without a right arm but who, as the demanding and eloquent later (1919) Nocturnes illustrate, became a distinguished pianist.
Welcome as this disc is, a more imaginative and persuasive player might have been found for it than Guimaraes, who is certainly efficient but conspicuously wooden and lacking in subtle tonal nuance.'
Nepomuceno Piano Music
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