São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, Roberto Minczuk - Dancas Brasileiras (2011)

Is it ironic that Sweden's BIS label has emerged as a champion of Brazilian music? Maybe they need some tropical color to get through the months of darkness up there. More seriously, Brazilian music fits well with the label's larger attempt to revive tonal and national traditions of the early 20th century. Recorded in 2003, this album is, in a few words, a great deal of fun, and the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra under Robert Minczuk offers music that has occasionally been performed in the past but has rarely been brought together to produce an hour of pulsing rhythms. The most famous Brazilian composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos, is represented by the little-known Dança frenética (1919). Villa-Lobos is in the middle of the roughly chronological sequence, and even earlier works like Alberto Nepomuceno's "Batuque" (track 2), with its odd pentatonic melody, offer a distinctive Brazilian voice. Francisco Mignone's Congada (taken, like many of these pieces, from an opera), is Brazilian Ravel, overflowing with invention and rhythmic drive, and the Très Danças para Orquestra of Camargo Guarnieri are Brazilian Copland, composed in 1928 before Copland was doing this kind of thing. Sample the "Batuque" of Oscar Lorenza Fernández (track 6) for an idea of this album's simple but real pleasures. The modern pieces aren't uniformly successful, but the album is worth the purchase price for "A Chegada dos Candangos," an excerpt from the Sinfonia da Alvorada, one of the neglected orchestral works of jazz composer and songwriter Antônio Carlos Jobim. Using several different producers, BIS gets superb sound from the Sala São Paulo, a magnificent concert hall housed in a train station. As enjoyable as it is unusual.