Santoro: Symphonies Nos. 5 & 7 "Brasília" Goiás Philharmonic Orchestra & Neil Thomson

• Cláudio Santoro (1919 - 1989): Symphony No. 5:
• 1 Santoro: Symphony No. 5: I. Andante mosso 12:53
• 2 Santoro: Symphony No. 5: II. Allegro molto assai 05:31
• 3 Santoro: Symphony No. 5: III. Lento. Tema con variazioni 06:08
• 4 Santoro: Symphony No. 5: IV. Moderato 08:23
• Symphony No. 7 "Brasília":
• 5 Santoro: Symphony No. 7 "Brasília": I. Andante 13:58
• 6 Santoro: Symphony No. 7 "Brasília": II. Adagio 07:36
• 7 Santoro: Symphony No. 7 "Brasília": III. Scherzo. Vivo 05:10
• 8 Santoro: Symphony No. 7 "Brasília": IV. Allegro molto 10:36
• Total Runtime 01:10:15

Info for Santoro: Symphonies Nos. 5 & 7 "Brasília"

Claudio Santoro was one of Brazil’s most eminent and influential composers. Over a 50-year period, he wrote a cycle of 14 symphonies that is widely acclaimed as the most significant cycle of its kind ever written in Brazil. The two selected works in this inaugural volume of the first complete recording of his symphonies focus on the 1950s, a period when Santoro sought a more direct and communicative idiom using Brazilian elements. His use of folk-based material is nonetheless highly creative, sometimes indeed abstract, as in key moments of Symphony No. 5. Symphony No. 7 is one of his most complex and intense works, a celebration of his country’s new capital Brasília in music of striking modernity.

Claudio Santoro’s fourteen symphonies represent the largest and most significant set of works in the genre ever composed in Brazil. Written between 1940 and 1989, they cover most of the composer’s different aesthetic phases, and offer a comprehensive and detailed survey of the way in which his music evolved over the years.

Santoro began his musical training in his native city of Manaus. An extremely talented violinist, he received a local government scholarship to continue his studies in Rio de Janeiro, and his earliest works date from this period. His First Symphony, written in 1940 when he was just 21 and had not yet begun to study composition in any formal way, impressed the German musician and teacher Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, leader of the ‘Música Viva’ movement, made up of young composers seeking out new directions in which to take Brazilian music, in line with the European avant-garde of the time.

In the late 1940s, however, Santoro’s music took a radical turn, as a result of his political-ideological convictions and his role as the Brazilian delegate to the 1948 Prague Congress of Progressive Composers, whose final manifesto urged composers to avoid excessive subjectivity and look to their national folk traditions for inspiration. The works Santoro wrote during the 1950s were influenced by his search for a more direct and immediately communicative idiom, an effect he achieved by using nationalist elements. During that decade, he composed four symphonies, of which the Fifth and Seventh were the most imposing in scale.

His Fifth Symphony was composed in 1955 and premiered the following year by the Rio de Janeiro Orquestra Sinfônica do Theatro Municipal, under the baton of the composer. Although this is one of the central works of Santoro’s Brazilian phase and draws on folk-based material, his way of using this material is very different from the solutions employed by other composers of the same period, in that he applies a more abstract approach, with no thought of reproducing traditional music or recreating the atmosphere of folk or other traditional forms.

The opening movement is a good example of this. One of the elements most frequently used by composers of the nationalist school to incorporate a folk-based feel to their music was the Lydian-Mixolydian mode, which has an augmented fourth and minor seventh and is typically used in the traditional music of northeastern Brazil. Santoro, however, uses the same material to construct a tense, mysterious discourse, dominated by the tightly woven counterpoint in the strings, with no direct reference to folk music. ...

Goias Philharmonic Orchestra
Neil Thomson, conductor

Neil Thomson
was born in London in 1966, studied violin and viola at the Royal Academy of Music (1984-87) and conducting with Norman Del Mar at the Royal College of Music (1987-89). He was a member of the conducting class at Tanglewood Summer School in 1989 where his teachers included Gustav Meier, Seiji Ozawa, Kurt Sanderling and Leonard Bernstein.

Since March 2014 he has served as Principal Conductor and Artistic Director of the Goiás Philharmonic Orchestra in Brazil. The orchestra has rapidly developed a reputation for its dynamic performances, its wide-ranging repertoire (with a special emphasis on Brazilian and contemporary music). In December 2018 the orchestra performed the South American debut of Messiaen's monumental "Des Canyons aux Étoiles". This was a highlight in development of the orchestra and an extremely important moment in the history of Brazilian orchestral music.

In the UK he has conducted the London Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philharmonia, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Hallé, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Ulster Orchestra and the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera.

Recent débuts include concerts with the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo Philharmonic, Century Orchestra Osaka, Kansai Philharmonic, Concert Orchestra, Lahti Sinfonia, Romanian National Orchestra, Britten Sinfonia, Ulster Orchestra, RTE Concert Orchestra, Orchestra of Gothenburg Opera, Aarhus Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of Opera North, São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, Brazilian Symphony Orchestra, Minas Gerais Philharmonic Orchestra and Buenos Aires Philharmonic Orchestra.

He has performed with many distinguished soloists including Sir James Galway, Dame Moura Lympany, Sir Thomas Allen, Dame Felicity Lott, Philip Langridge, Sarah Chang, Antonio Meneses, Nelson Freire, Alice Zawadzki, Steven Isserlis, Julian Lloyd Webber, David Geringas, Natalie Clein, Gyorgy Pauk, Brett Dean, Jean-Philippe Collard, Stephen Hough, Peter Jablonski, Jean-Louis Steuerman, Dame Evelyn Glennie and Sir Richard Rodney Bennett.

Recent collaborations include Brahms Second Piano Concerto with Nelson Freire, a tour of Japan with Nobuyuki Tsujii and the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra, the Unsuk Chin Violin Concerto with Viviane Hagner, an opera gala with Danielle de Niese, tours in Brazil with Antonio Meneses, Cristian Budu and Jean Louis Steuerman, Liszt Second Piano Concerto and Brahms Second Piano Concerto with Stephen Hough, the premiere of Joseph Phibb’s new Percussion Concerto with Dame Evelyn Glennie and a rare performance of the complete Incidental Music from ‘Hassan’ by Delius at the Cheltenham Festival.

Alongside his symphonic work he also works with projects with film. He gave the premiere of the newly reconstructed score for 'Singin' in the Rain' at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 2013. Other films include 'Psycho', 'Vertigo', 'Casablanca', 'The Wizard of Oz', 'Fantasia', ´Amadeus´ and 'Titanic'. He recently gave the premiere, with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, of ‘Gene Kelly; A Life in Music’, a project with film devised by the widow of Gene Kelly, Patricia Kelly, to preserve the artist’s musical heritage.

Recordings include some discs the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and London Symphony Orchestra and three discs of orchestral music by Cesar Guerra-Peixe with the Goiás Philharmonic Orchestra. He is currently engaged on a project to record all 14 symphonies of Claudio Santoro for Naxos with the OFG.

From 1992 until 2006 he served as Head of Conducting at the Royal College of Music. The youngest-ever incumbent of this post (first held by Sir Adrian Boult in 1919 and later by Norman Del Mar), he was made an Honorary Member of the RCM in 1994 for his services to the institution and has established an enviable reputation as an orchestral trainer.

His skills as a natural communicator have enhanced an already growing reputation as a professor throughout Europe. He has been a Guest Professor at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, the Krakow Academy of Music, the Conservatoire "Arrigo Boito" in Parma, the Lithuanian Academy of Music, the Campos do Jordão Festival and the Los Angeles Conducting Workshop. In 2002 he was invited by Lorin Maazel to be on the jury for the European rounds of the Maazel Conducting Competition and in 2007 was on the jury, alongside Gunther Schuller, of the Eduardo Mata International Conducting Competition in Mexico City.

Booklet for Santoro: Symphonies Nos. 5 & 7 "Brasília"