Although virtually unknown outside his native land, Alberto Nepomuceno (1864-1920) is one of the luminaries of Brazilian music. He composed his Série Brasileira (‘Brazilian Suite’, 1891) while studying with Brahms’s friend Heinrich von Herzongenberg in Berlin. The four-movement suite is absolutely delightful and quite original in its way. Nepomuceno’s influences are readily apparent: the opening movement’s depiction of dawn in the mountains seems to draw on the ‘Scène aux champs’ from Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique as well as Wagner’s Forest Murmurs. Yet the music also looks ahead, and sometimes in startling ways, as at 2'13" with its fragrant foreshadowing of Debussy’s tone-painting of daybreak in La mer. In the third movement, lilting wooziness simply and effectively evokes the languid charm of napping in a hammock, while the final Batuque’s vigorous, syncopated rhythms – drawn from an Afro Brazilian dance – is unlike anything in European music at that time (the closest parallel might be Gottschalk’s A Night in the Tropics of 1859).

I find the suite far more successful than the G minor Symphony (1893), although the latter gets top billing on the CD cover. It was written around the time Nepomuceno married a student of Grieg’s and was befriended by the Norwegian composer. The back of the disc trumpets Brahms’s influence, and although there are some distinctly Brahmsian moments – the play of two against three in the lovely second theme of the Andante quasi adagio, for instance – there’s just as much Schumann and Wagner. I rather like the unexpected mix of Beethoven and Bizet in the Scherzo but in general there’s not quite enough of Nepomuceno himself.

The lack of individuality is especially noticeable when one turns to the lively prelude to O Garatuja (1904), Nepomuceno’s unfinished comic opera. Here, the rhythms dance, the folk-inflected melodic material is fresh, and a wealth of harmonic and colouristic detail tickles the ear. The entire programme is played with panache by the Minas Gerais Philharmonic, who sound far more polished and mature than one would expect from an orchestra founded just a decade ago.

This is the first instalment in what’s promised to be a 30-disc survey of Brazilian music, a joint project between Naxos and the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. If subsequent volumes maintain the high standards heard here, we have a lot to look forward to. Urgently recommended.