Glauco VELÁSQUEZ (1884-1914)
Violin Sonata No. 1, Delírio (1909) [18:22]
Violin Sonata No. 2 (1911) [23:11]
Leopoldo MIGUEZ (1850-1902)
Violin Sonata, Op. 14 (1885) [29:52]
Emmanuele Baldini (violin)
Karin Fernandes (piano)
rec. 2014, Teatro Humboldt, São Paulo, Brazil
NAXOS 8.574118 [71:27]
Naxos and the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs launched their Brazilian music series with the symphony and other orchestral music by Nepomuceno. They now pursue the mission with three multi-movement and completely unknown violin sonatas. There are two shortish examples by Velasquez and one by Miguez.
Any sonata entitled Delirio promises a higher emotional octane than the common run. So it is that Velasquez’s First Sonata bursts onto the scene with ringing romantic lyricism brought to the boil. This three-movement score from 1909 triangulates between Brahms, Franck, Liszt and, surely unwittingly, William Baines, and early Delius. High fervour smokes and radiates from these pages. The only ‘departure’ comes in the final hazily impressionistic pages. The music seems more European than Latin-American.
The Miguez dates from well into the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Again, lyricism spills forth and does so fluently but mixed in with some Kreislerian sweetness. There’s a hesitantly shaped, moonlit Andante Espressivo and a confident, slightly salon-style Scherzo that dips and skips. The Kreisler aspect also echoes around the final Vivace.
The disc concludes with Velasquez's Second Sonata. It was completed when the composer was only 27 and had just three more years to live. It again plunges and swings its way through three movements in a Grieg-like style. The finale is bold and confident and at 11:03 not at all perfunctory. The composer shapes it as a substantial statement of romantic substance and mastery. Its peroration ends at high pulse and temperature.
On this evidence, triumphantly grasped lyrical opportunities and a heightened sense of rapture mark out Velasquez from Miguez. Velasquez seems the more advanced and unchained composer with storm and impetuosity turbulent in his creative DNA. Miguez, among much else enlightened work for the emergent Republic’s musical life, won a competition for a similarly newly-minted national anthem.
The recording and the playing of Baldini and Fernandes and are quite exemplary.
If there is a criticism of Leonardo Martinelli's liner-notes it is that they starve us of biographical information, although there is a bit more about Miguez than about Velasquez.
Rob Barnett
