Portuguese Symphony Orchestra, Álvaro Cassuto - Braga Santos: Symphonies Nos. 3 & 6 (1998) CD-Rip

There has not been much of a symphonic tradition in Portugal, but this century has thrown up two symphonists of some significance – Luis de Freitas Branco (brother of the conductor Pedro), who is absent from the catalogues, and, more importantly, his pupil Joly Braga Santos, whose own protege Alvaro Cassuto is opening our eyes and ears to his stature. His First and Fifth Symphonies (Marco Polo, 7/98) came as something of a revelation: here again we have one work from each of his two contrasting compositional periods. Symphony No. 3 (written in 1949) is bound together by a number of common motifs: it is a closely reasoned, strikingly scored work of modal tendencies (occasionally bringing Vaughan Williams to mind); the Allegro section of its finale is centred on a brilliant double fugue. A strong, virile symphony whose stature can be ranked with Sibelius – absolutely not to be missed!
Braga Santos’s last symphony (1972) is in one movement but several sections, and is curiously disparate in character and idiom. For two-thirds of its length it is purely orchestral, aggressively atonal and disjunctive, with numerous angry outbursts; then it suddenly changes tack to a more consonant choral section and a peaceful, entirely tonal movement for soprano, both settings (in the Galician tongue) of poems by the sixteenth-century Camoes. In both works, performance and recording are first-rate.'