Brasil

No. 319 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages, which can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast319

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I think it’s been a few years since we’ve put together a travelogue montage. So, in the spiorit of past such playlists, here are some works inspired by Brazil, or composed by Brazilian composers.

Brazil is the largest country in both South America and Latin America; at 8.5 million square kilometers and with over 208 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area and the fifth most populous. The land now called Brazil was claimed for the Portuguese Empire on 22 April 1500, with the arrival of the Portuguese fleet commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral. This legendary crossing was depicted in a 1936 Brazilian educational/adventure film O Descobrimento do Brasil (Trad. Lit. The Discovery of Brazil) directed by Humberto Mauro and starring Alvaro Costa, João de Deus, and Manoel Rocha. Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos wrote the score for the film, from which he extracted no less than four orchestral suites – his second suite is featured as one of the main works in today’s podcast.

Today, Brazil is unique in South America as a Portuguese-speaking country (rather than the prevailing Spanish everywhere else). The opening track of the montage, The Girl from Ipanema, is sung in both Portuguese and English and illustrates my point of how foreign-sounding Portuguese can be, even for people like me comfortable with Latin-based languages. This Brazilian bossa nova and jazz song was a worldwide hit in the mid-1960s. The version I retained features the then-husband and wife duo of Astrid and João Gilberto. She sang on two tracks on the 1963 album Getz/Gilberto featuring he husband, Stan Getz, and Antônio Carlos Jobim, despite having never sung professionally before this recording. Mr. Gilberto, who sings the Portuguese lyrics on the track, was often called "father of bossa nova" and passed away last month.

Ottorino Respighi made his first trip to Brazil in May 1927, leading a concert series of his own music in Rio de Janeiro. Before his return to Europe, Respighi announced to the Brazilian press that he'd been absorbing local music and custom during his stay and would return the following year with a five-part orchestral suite based on his experiences. Respighi did, in fact, return to Rio de Janeiro in June 1928, but more pressing matters had weighed upon him in the interim, and the promised five-movement suite was presented only as a three-movement work entitled Brazilian Impressions. It nonetheless was warmly received; the result being that Respighi subsequently dropped the plan to add the two additional movements.

Written in 1927, The Rio Grande (set to the poem of the same name by Sacheverell Sitwell) is a secular cantata by English composer Constant Lambert. It is an example of symphonic jazz, not unlike the style of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, although it is very much Lambert's individual conception.

Here’s the catch: the poem refers to a river in Brazil, although there is no Brazilian river called Rio Grande!

From 1917 to 1919 Darius Milhaud served as secretary to Paul Claudel, the eminent poet and dramatist who was then the French ambassador to Brazil, and with whom Milhaud collaborated for many years, setting music for many of Claudel's poems and plays. On his return to France, Milhaud composed works influenced by the Brazilian popular music he had heard, including compositions of Brazilian pianist and composer Ernesto Nazareth. Le bœuf sur le toit includes melodies by Nazareth and other popular Brazilian composers of the time, and evokes the sounds of Carnaval. Among the melodies is, in fact, a Carnaval tune by the name of "The Bull (or the ox) on the Roof".

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