I’m not sure if the
recording, made in Château Fallot,
Salle de Musique, Lausanne is quite
optimum for this kind of music. It tends
to spread a bit and therefore can blunt
some of Villa-Lobos’s crisper more detonatory
writing but it’s otherwise good and
I wouldn’t make too much of it in the
light of the first class playing of
Polish-born Joanna
Brzezińska.
She deals with the
Suite Floral with athleticism
and tonally expressive colour. Crucially
she also characterises with flair and
imagination, warm in the Summer Idyll,
not afraid to shy away from the bass
incursions of A Singing Country Girl.
By the time she arrives at Joy in
the Garden she is on top form, virtuosic
and full of élan. The bulk of
the disc is given over to both books
of A Prole do Bebê and
here we witness no falling off of laudable
qualities. There’s clarity and passagework
evenness in Branquinha, Paganinian
glitter in Negrinha and plangency,
verdancy and colouristic prism a-plenty
in A Probrezinha. She manages
to evoke a burnished, teaky tone for
Bruxa, contrasting it with elastic
treble tracery.
In the second book
she deigns, quite rightly, to stint
the elation and danger of the music.
Her O Comaundongo de massa is
correspondingly vital and exciting and
elsewhere we find a certain insouciance
and darting Debussian eloquence (O
Passarinho de panno). As an envoi
I certainly enjoyed the way she plays
with the Ragtime elements of Choro
No.1 Tipico. Her rubati are clever
and not self-regarding and she projects
the piece with considerable accomplishment
so much so, in fact, that I didn’t miss
its original incarnation for guitar.
As for competitors
Sonia Rubinsky on Naxos splits both
books of A Prole do Bebê
between two discs but Alma
Petchersky on ASV includes both, adding
Poema Singelo, Idylio Na Rede and
Alegria Na Horta. If you find
Brzezińska
insufficiently tensile and super-virtuosic
you could try Hamelin on Hyperion CDA67176.
He is always faster, sometimes remarkably
so, than she is, and digs into the darker
interstices of Book II more malignly.
He’s so fast that we have time for an
arsenal of makeweights including the
important Rudepoêma.
Jonathan Woolf
Joanna Brzezińska (piano) 
