Ernesto Nazareth: Solo Piano Works / Marcelo Bratke
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- Quartz Music
- January 1, 2009
NAZARETH Brejeiro. Pássaros em Festa. Tenebroso. Apanhei-te Cavaquinho. Confidêcias. Sarambeque. Travesso. Coração que Sente. Odeon. Epônina. Cubanos. Crê e Espera. Fon Fon. Vesper. Faceira. Batuque. Ameno Resedá • Marcelo Bratke (pn) • QUARTZ 2066 (64:00)
One cannot overestimate Ernesto Nazareth’s influence on the development of Brazilian music. An enormously gifted child pianist who published his first work, a polka, at age 14, his first ambition was to be a proper Eurocentric composer. Chopin was one of his first heroes, and remained a musical ideal throughout his career. But then he was born into Rio de Janeiro’s ethnically diverse musical culture with its ubiquitous choro street musicians and their African and American ragtime influences. In his subsequent music he presented a synthesis of European salon music (many of his pieces are titled as gallops, quadrilles, Schottisches, fox-trots, and romances) and those colorfully indigenous musics. Historic hindsight implies that he was a seminal influence upon such younger Brazilian composers as the Afro-Brasilian Pixinguinha, and, ultimately, Heitor Villa-Lobos, who strove to pull those bifurcated influences from the streets and salons and into the concert hall. Similarly he also inspired such diverse composers as the quite classically acceptable Camargo Guarnieri and Antonio Carlos Jobim of bossa nova fame.
In Nazareth’s time, Rio de Janeiro was an extremely class- and race-conscious place. Street musicians were universally held in low esteem. Many of them, however, were actually gainfully employed members of the staunchly upright middle class who, when they took to the streets after work, assumed new identities via colorfully fictitious names. I bring this up because it has great bearing on these performances by Marcello Bratke. Ernesto Nazareth, first and foremost, wanted to be regarded as a socially acceptable Eurocentric composer who would ultimately find his way into the legitimate concert hall. Nazareth’s performing venues were, alas, theaters, hotels, and upscale cinemas where he improvised accompaniments to silent movies much as Dmitri Shostakovich would later do in his youth in a more far flung part of the world. Nazareth’s music, at its best, displays an almost Chopinesque elegance and polish. And that is quite eloquently reflected in these performances by Marcelo Bratke.
FANFARE: William Zagorski
Product Description:
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Release Date: January 01, 2009
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UPC: 880040206620
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Catalog Number: QTZ2066
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Label: Quartz Music
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Number of Discs: 1
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Composer: Ernesto, Nazareth
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Performer: Marcelo Bratke