PostClassical Ensemble’s Brazilian Sampler
By • December 2, 2024 0 14
For this listener, the most transcendent moment in PostClassical Ensemble’s “Legends of Brazil” program, presented on Nov. 19 and 20 in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater, arrived about five-sixths of the way through.
Jazz vocalist Elin Melgarejo finished the fourth number of her lively set, “Samba em Prelúdio,” and stepped away from her microphone, on the left side of the stage. Arranged for orchestra by Jaques Morelenbaum, this bittersweet samba, based on the introduction (Prelúdio) to the fourth of Heitor Villa-Lobos’s “Bachianas Brasileiras,” was written in 1962 by Baden Powell and Vinicius de Moraes.
Then, without pause, the winds and percussion sat out as Ángel Gil-Ordóñez, PostClassical’s co-founder and music director, led the strings — ever so slowly, with concertmaster Netanel Dreiblate taking the melody — in Villa-Lobos’s gorgeous piece, a 1942 orchestration of a work written for piano in the 1930s.
What a segue! And this pairing of linked but stylistically contrasting works was the program in a (Brazil) nutshell. Subtitled “A Musical Celebration for 200 Years of Friendship,” the 90-minute sampler was guest-curated by composer Flávio Chamis. A conducting assistant to Leonard Bernstein in his youth, Chamis later served as music director of the Orquestra Sinfônica de Porto Alegre.
Also fluent in various jazz and Brazilian genres, Chamis composed one and a half of the other songs performed stylishly by Melgarejo: “Labirinto” and the “Two Note Samba” he playfully appended to Antônio Carlos Jobim’s and Newton Mendonça’s bossa nova gem “One Note Samba” of 1959. (To Whom It May Concern: We who do not speak Portuguese would have welcomed English translations of the lyrics.)
Guest André Mehmari is another effortless crossover artist. The same man who played virtuosic solo piano intros to Melgarejo’s songs and accompanied her with flair — if you closed your eyes, you could almost imagine yourself at Blues Alley — performed duets, one of which he composed, with guest violist Tatyana Mead Chamis earlier that evening.
Dedicated to Chamis (wife of the program’s curator), Mehmari’s “Sonata for Viola and Piano” was nominated for a 2017 Latin Grammy for Best Classical Contemporary Composition. The two were attentive collaborators, flawlessly performing three movements (I, III and IV) in a variety of tempos, time signatures and textures.
The other Mehmari-Chamis performance was the charming “Brazilian Waltz No. 1,” transcribed in 1968 from an earlier piano piece by Francisco Mignone. A major Brazilian composer, whose name is much less well known abroad than that of Villa-Lobos, Mignone died in 1986 at age 88.
A highlight of the program was the U.S. premiere — dedicated to the memory of his wife, pianist Maria Josephina Mignone, who died in July at 101 — of two of the seven “quadros” (pictures or paintings) from Mignone’s mid-20th-century “Quadros Amazônicos”: “Saci” and “Caapora,” named for a trickster and a forest protector, respectively, from indigenous mythology. Standing out in these Stravinskian portraits were timpanist William Richards and trombonist Matthew Guilford.
In addition to the Chamises, Mehmari and Melgarejo, Gil-Ordóñez and his fine-tuned 28-piece chamber orchestra were joined by percussionist Lucas Ashby and bassist Tony DePaolis, who added Brazilian seasoning as needed, starting with PCE’s rendition of Zequinha de Abreu’s Latin jazz standard “Tico-Tico no Fubá,” which opened the program. A male flutist, identity unknown, played a jazzy obbligato to one of Melgarejo’s songs.
The concluding piece, commissioned by the Embassy of Brazil, was a world premiere: “Rag-Chorado: A Celebratory Humoreske.” Mehmari, its composer, described it in the program notes as “an imaginary encounter between Scott Joplin and Ernesto Nazareth shaking hands and talking music.” Nazareth is best known for writing what he called “Brazilian tangos,” including a piece sung by Melgarejo: “Odeon” of 1909, named for a Rio movie theater where Nazareth provided live piano accompaniment for silent films.
Combining “Rag” from ragtime with “Chorado” from choro — an Afro-Brazilian small-group genre of the same period, likewise syncopated, pronounced “SHO-roo” — the piece amusingly quoted not only Joplin and Nazareth (whose lives overlapped, though Joplin died in 1917 and Nazareth, who had been institutionalized, in 1934) but Gershwin, Bizet, Rossini, Beethoven and no doubt a few others.
