Egberto Gismonti - Saudacoes [2CD] (2009)

Composer, guitarist, and pianist Egberto Gismonti is one of the less celebrated but most interesting products of Brazil's progressive scene in the late '60s and early '70s. His music has been classified as rock, pop, jazz, and classical music, sometimes for the same album in different releases. The orchestral work on the first disc of this two-disc set tends toward the classical side, and it displays Gismonti's skills as an orchestrator. Those skills came down from Ravel through a French tradition represented by, among others, Nadia Boulanger, who had Gismonti as one of her later students. Hear the masterful use of the strings as percussive scrapers in the first of the seven movements of the attractively titled Sert?es Veredas -- Tributo ? Miscigena??o, meaning Backroads Paths -- Tribute to Miscegenation. As the title implies, the music is something of a chamber-orchestra survey of Brazilian popular traditions, beginning where Villa-Lobos left off. Each movement is in three more or less well-defined sections, and Gismonti covers a lot of ground in his wanderings, giving the music a kaleidoscopic feel. It is all so concise and closely tied together, however, that it never feels like a fantasy. It's a crowd-pleasing yet rigorous piece of national music that could fit on any of the Latin-flavored orchestral programs that have become popular in both North America and Europe. Indeed, the performance by Cuba's all-female Camerata Romeu under director Zenaida Romeu leaves room for other versions; the group naturally plays with strong awareness of the rhythmic bases of Gismonti's writing, but the strings are at times less than sparkling. The Duetos de Viol?es or guitar duets on the second disc are performed by Gismonti and his son Alexandre. They would seem to fall more on the jazz side of the spectrum, but are often more dissonant harmonically than the seven Sert?es Veredas. Recommended for anyone interested in the fertile and genre-crossing South American scene.