Fernando Lopes-Graça - Symphony; Rustic Suite (Álvaro Cassuto)

Information

Composer: Fernando Lopes-Graça

• (01) Suite Rústica No. 1
• (07) December Poem
• (08) Festival March
• (09) Symphony for Orchestra

Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Álvaro Cassuto, conductor

Date: 2012
Label: Naxos
https://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.572892

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Review

ARTISTIC QUALITY: 9 / SOUND QUALITY: 9

Portuguese composer Fernando Lopes-Graça (1908-93)  is a difficult composer to pigeon-hole. His symphony in particular starts off a bit like Honegger’s First (sound clip below), but the neoclassical cut and thrust of its themes and rhythms, ostensibly owing something to Stravinsky, has the composer sounding more like his Latin American colleagues than his European brethren. Perhaps the most appealing single movement is its central Intermezzo, while the final Passacaglia, based on a very short theme, is equally short-winded, although it contains some very striking individual episodes when it takes the time to be a bit more expansive. Composed in 1944, this is a very interesting if nonetheless inconsistent work, and it’s well worth your attention.

Among the remaining pieces, the most intriguing is the Suite Rústica No. 1 (1950), a six-movement occasional work that manages to live up to its title without any obvious folkloric influences—rather, any folk idioms have been wholly absorbed into the composer’s personal style, much as was the case with Bartók. December Poem is a somber, reflective work whose free use of dissonance in a lyrical context makes for a bittersweet 10 minutes of introspection, while the Festival March is more combative than celebratory. Conductor Álvaro Cassuto has chosen these pieces wisely to display Lopes-Graça’s compositional range, and has compiled an excellent introduction to his art. As we have come to expect in this ongoing series, he also gets excellent results from the orchestra, and is very well recorded. Hopefully there’s more to come.

-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday

More reviews:
MusicWeb International  RECORDING OF THE MONTH
https://www.naxos.com/reviews/reviewslist.asp?catalogueid=8.572892&languageid=EN
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lopes-Graca-Symphony-Orchestra-Rustic-December/dp/B007N0SVTC

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fernando Lopes-Graça (Tomar, 17 December 1906 – Parede, near Cascais, November 27, 1994) was a Portuguese composer, conductor and musicologist. As a composer, Lopes-Graça was influenced by Portuguese popular music, which he also studied, continuing the work of the composer and musicologist Francisco de Lacerda. He completed the Dicionário de Música (Dictionary of Music), started by his teacher, Tomás Borba, himself a composer. Lopes-Graça was a member of the Portuguese Communist Party and strenuously opposed the Estado Novo and its leader António de Oliveira Salazar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Lopes-Gra%C3%A7a

***

Álvaro Cassuto (born 1938) is a Portuguese composer and conductor. He was born in Porto, Portugal, and studied in Lisbon and Berlin. Cassuto has been music director of the Portuguese Radio Symphony, the New Portuguese Philharmonia, the Portuguese Symphony Orchestra, the Algarve Orchestra and the Lisbon Metropolitan Orchestra. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Koussevitzky Memorial Prize. Cassuto has recorded many highly successful CDs for the Strauss, Portugalsom, Marco Polo and Naxos record labels, notably a series of recordings of Portuguese composers for Naxos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81lvaro_Cassuto

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

FLAC, tracks

Links in comment

Enjoy!