Joly Braga Santos - Symphonies Nos. 3 & 6 (Álvaro Cassuto)

Information

Composer: Joly Braga Santos

• (01) Symphony No. 3
• (05) Symphony No. 6

Ana Esrer Neves, soprano
Coro do Teatro Nacional de São Carlos; João Paulo Santos, director
Portuguese Symphony Orchestra
Álvaro Cassuto, conductor

Date: 1998
Label: Marco Polo
https://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.225087

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Review

There has not been much of a symphonic tradition in Portugal, but this century has thrown up two symphonists of some significance – Luis de Freitas Branco (brother of the conductor Pedro), who is absent from the catalogues, and, more importantly, his pupil Joly Braga Santos, whose own protege Alvaro Cassuto is opening our eyes and ears to his stature. His First and Fifth Symphonies (Marco Polo, 7/98) came as something of a revelation: here again we have one work from each of his two contrasting compositional periods. Symphony No. 3 (written in 1949) is bound together by a number of common motifs: it is a closely reasoned, strikingly scored work of modal tendencies (occasionally bringing Vaughan Williams to mind); the Allegro section of its finale is centred on a brilliant double fugue. A strong, virile symphony whose stature can be ranked with Sibelius – absolutely not to be missed!

Braga Santos’s last symphony (1972) is in one movement but several sections, and is curiously disparate in character and idiom. For two-thirds of its length it is purely orchestral, aggressively atonal and disjunctive, with numerous angry outbursts; then it suddenly changes tack to a more consonant choral section and a peaceful, entirely tonal movement for soprano, both settings (in the Galician tongue) of poems by the sixteenth-century Camoes. In both works, performance and recording are first-rate.

-- Lionel Salter, Gramophone

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Joly Braga Santos (May 14, 1924 – July 18, 1988) was a Portuguese composer and conductor. He studied violin and composition at the National Conservatoire of Lisbon, and was a disciple of Luís de Freitas Branco. After the Second World War, he was able to go abroad, having studied conducting with Hermann Scherchen and Antonino Votto, and composition with Virgilio Mortari. Braga Santos was considered the leading Portuguese composer of the 20th century. He wrote six symphonies, three operas, chamber music for a wide variety of instruments and ensembles, film scores, and several choral works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joly_Braga_Santos

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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

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