Mixing the classical with a joyous, hot samba rhythm
São Paolo Symphony Orchestra Royal Albert Hall
What is Brazil, musically? Samba, comes the instant response, and all the other wonderful varieties of African-tinged song and dance that country has given us.
That creates a problem for the São Paolo Symphony Orchestra. They want to be taken seriously on the international stage, which means playing the core classics to a high level, yet to ignore their own music would be perverse. The trouble is that the two traditions are like oil and water. One is rooted in the metaphysical, always yearning for the beyond, the other is the joyous celebration of the here and now, expressed in sultry bodily rhythms.
In these two Proms on the same night, the São Paolo honoured both, in a strategically cunning way that suggested there might be common ground between them. The first, main Prom, was devoted partly to popular classics, partly to 20th-century Brazilian “classical” pieces.
Kabbalah, by the senior Brazilian composer Marlos Nobre, tried to seize the notion of a secret Jewish wisdom through an incessant play of irregular rhythms, coloured with Brazilian percussion – a startling approach to a mystical theme, but surprisingly effective. The prelude to Bachianas
Brasileiras No 4 by Brazil’s national composer Villa-Lobos was based on a four-note melodic theme from Bach, though the Baroque reference was all but drowned in tropical heat.
Alongside these was Grieg’s Piano Concerto, played with a winning mixture of decisiveness and careless ease by Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero. The orchestra and conductor Marin Alsop were very deft in support, and in Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances they truly shone. The little hesitations in the waltzing middle movement, and the slow passage in the finale, where Rachmaninov’s nostalgia for his homeland breaks the surface, took on an eloquent shapeliness.
The second, late-night, Prom, where Alsop acted as compere as well as conductor in a whistle-stop tour through Brazilian popular music, seemed at first sight to be miles away from the first. The guest players from the São Paolo Jazz Symphony Orchestra created a seething rhythmic excitement in numbers such as Egberto Gismonti’s Frevo. But the sophisticated orchestral arrangements took the music in another direction, reminding us that the joys of the here and now are transient. Nowhere was this feeling more poignantly expressed than in Buarque’s and Lobo’s Beatriz, played with exquisite tenderness by the orchestra’s principal violist Horácio Schaefer.