Fernando Araujo - Francisco Mignone: Manuscritos de Buenos Aires (2021)

Author of an extensive and comprehensive work, which includes from pieces for the most diverse instruments to operas and great orchestral works, Francisco Mignone (1897-1986) was a respected and active pianist, conductor, composer and teacher. A natural talent for composition and spontaneous ease, he was one of the central figures of the 20th century Brazilian art scene alongside important names such as the writer Mário de Andrade (1893-1945) and many others. He wrote his first plays when he was only ten years old and the last, a few months before he died, at 88 years old.

Formed in piano, flute and composition, the guitar was an instrument virtually ignored by Mignone during most of his career as a composer. Eventually he was touched by youth serenades. Now, just over 35 years after his death, an unprecedented recording of his guitar compositions are revealed through the album Francisco Mignone: Manuscritos de Buenos Aires, with the touches of guitarists Fernando Araújo and Celso Faria, in addition to soprano Mônica Pedrosa, in compositions for guitar and voice.

The trio of Minas Gerais interpreters was together for three months, between November 2018 and January 2019, for the recordings at Estúdio Engenho, in Belo Horizonte. The album that is now out on the Sesc Seal and will be available, exclusively and for free, on the Sesc Digital platform on April 14, is another development of the research work that Fernando Araújo has been developing on top of the Buenos Aires manuscripts, Francisco Mignone, and who four years ago resulted in his doctoral thesis at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), at the time, also serving to reveal to the Brazilian musical milieu the scores that had been found in Argentina and until then not registered in composer's catalog.

In the repertoire of the album that Fernando Araújo signs the musical direction, arrangements and edition of the scores, highlighting the “Four Brazilian pieces”, which includes the parts Maroca, Maxaxixando, Nazareth and Toada; the two parts of the “Brazilian waltz for two guitars”; and also “Song for two guitars”, all of which were not cataloged until they were discovered, in 2009. The set of eight instrumental pieces entitled “Manuscritos de Buenos Aires” completes the work “Lundu for two guitars”, the only one that was already documented in publication in the United States, dated 1974.

Written for the Duo Pomponio-Zárate - formed by the couple of Argentine guitarists Graciela Pomponio (1926-2007) and Jorge Martínez Zárate (1923-1993) -, the pieces that make up the Buenos Aires Manuscripts are dated 1970. In them, Mignone revisita some of his older piano compositions have been extensively reworked, with new sections and variation techniques. Another five pieces complete the album, such as songs for voice and guitar inspired by the extraordinary duo of Maria Lúcia Godoy and Sérgio Abreu and written in the mid-1970s. Here, again, the composer revisits works he had written in the first decades of the century, recreating -as for the new instrumental formation, such as the Spanish folk songs “Nana” and “Las mujeres son las moscas”.

In "The Impossible Affection", Mignone reappropriates the seventh corner waltz for piano in a surprisingly transformed way into a song of hopeless and poignant lyricism. And two pieces of the album are the only ones originally conceived for voice and guitar: “Choro” and “Dialogando” show the restlessness of the old composer, experiencing the possibilities of dialogue between voice and guitar and the unconventional use of the voice, treated, in some moments, like a wind instrument or strings.

In addition to the album Francisco Mignone: Manuscritos de Buenos Aires - songs for voice and guitar, the audience will also have contact with a presentation text of the project in the words of Fernando Araújo (read below), in addition to texts signed by Turíbio Santos, guitarist, Brazilian composer and musicologist, and the guitarist Sérgio Abreu, who together with his brother Eduardo formed the Duo Abreu - one of the most important in the history of Brazilian guitar and which despite the short trajectory marked the era in the 1970s with records released by the BBC Recital label - but soon he quit his career to become one of the greatest luthiers in the country. And finally, the process of artistic creation of the disc will be presented in a mini-documentary with testimonials from the musicians, producers and recording technicians involved, and an expected release on April 28 on the Sesc Sesc channel on YouTube.