Luís de Freitas Branco - Orchestral Works Vol. 3 (Álvaro Cassuto)

Information

Composer: Luís de Freitas Branco

• (01) Symphony No. 3
• (05) A Morte de Manfredo (The Death of Manfred)
• (06) Suite Alentejana No. 2

RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra
Álvaro Cassuto, conductor

Date: 2010
Label: Naxos
https://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.572370

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Review

ARTISTIC QUALITY: 9 / SOUND QUALITY: 9

Branco’s symphonies follow the pattern initiated by Franck and the French school, usually featuring cyclically recurring themes and a late-Romantic, Wagnerian harmonic idiom. However, the Third Symphony (1944) shows chromaticism gradually being replaced by something more interesting: a harder-edged sonority and a bolder use of diatonic dissonance. The result is quite individual and often very ear-catching. Indeed, if this 46-minute piece has any weakness, it’s that it is so profligate of material, with each theme having its own shape, scoring, and tempo, that the various movements seem to flow into one another without strong contrasts. Still, such musical abundance hardly can be faulted when the results are so enjoyable.

The Death of Manfred is an early piece for strings, nine aptly elegiac minutes, while the Suite, as the title suggests, is a folk-inspired work written in an entirely different style from the symphony. Here the influences are more Russian (think Rimsky-Korsakov and his crew), the orchestration sparkling and enriched with percussion, and the melodies obviously ethnic in origin. As with all of the releases in this series so far, Álvaro Cassuto conducts as persuasively as we have any right to expect, and Naxos’ sonics are excellent. A very attractive and welcome release. I do hope, though, that Naxos hasn’t given up on Braga Santos (still some more good stuff there) and several other members of the next generation of Portuguese composers. [5/28/2010]

-- David Hurwitz,

More reviews:
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2010/Nov10/branco_8572370.htm
https://www.naxos.com/reviews/reviewslist.asp?catalogueid=8.572370&languageid=EN
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Branco-Orchestral-Works-Symphony-Manfred/dp/B003DQWPBU

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Luís de Freitas Branco (Lisbon, 12 October 1890 – Lisbon, 27 November 1955) was a Portuguese composer, musicologist, and professor of music who played a pre-eminent part in the development of Portuguese music in the first half of the 20th century. Born into an aristocratic family, Freitas Branco had a cosmopolitan education and began composing at a precocious age. He studied music in Berlin and Paris, where he worked with Engelbert Humperdinck and other composers. He became professor of composition in 1916 at the Lisbon Conservatory of Music, where he taught, among many others, Joly Braga Santos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu%C3%ADs_de_Freitas_Branco

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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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