Joaquin Turina has left me cold, hitherto, so I was surprised to have warmed to his Serenata (1942). A warm, lyrical piece, it has one of those melodies that stays long in the mind, and has more character than Piazzolla’s two pallid Tangos, the first of which does not sound at all like the Argentinian (the French account places these more comfortably in an all-Piazzolla context). The other main novelty is the Concerto for Strings and Percussion by Mozart Camargo Guarnieri, a spirited neo-classical piece that did not strike me as obviously Brazilian in sound, or even Latin overmuch, in the way that Villa-Lobos’s Fantasia does, except perhaps in the percussion interlude in the finale.
Curiously, two other pieces do not seem, to the innocent ear, to sing with a notably Latin accent. The Concerto in D major (1951) by Braga Santos does not sound at all Portuguese, but English rather (and akin to Vaughan Williams, who was much in vogue in Lisbon at the time, in particular), while Gaos’s Impresion nocturna (1937) sounds more like Tchaikovsky than from Galicia.
I Musici de Montreal’s performances are impeccably played and beautifully recorded. Their accounts compare well with the rivals listed above and, in the cases of Braga Santos and Gaos, the Canadians are superior all round, bringing to the former a precision of ensemble and to the latter a warmth and intensity their Iberian rivals lack.'