Скачать или смотреть César Guerra-Peixe: Symphonic Suite No. 1 ‘Paulista’

Neil Thomson, Orquestra Filarmônica de Goiás

0:00 Cateretê
5:04 Jongo
11:38 Recomenda de almas
18:29 Tambu

Guerra-Peixe’s Symphonic Suite No. 1 ‘Paulista’ (relating to the State of São Paulo) was dedicated to Edoardo de Guarnieri, who gave its premiere at the helm of the São Paulo Municipal Symphony Orchestra in 1956. The first movement, Cateretê, is inspired by the dance of the same name, probably of indigenous origin and found across the South Central region of Brazil, in which sections of free, narrative-style singing alternate with rhythmical sections in which participants mark the beat by clapping their hands and tapping their feet. Guerra-Peixe uses this contrast to structure his movement: in the rhythmical section, the most characteristic element of the cateretê, he ingeniously orchestrates the sounds of hands and feet for strings and brass, rather than resorting to the more obvious percussion. In what would originally have been vocal sections, the tune is given to pairs of woodwind. The slower tempo and successive changes of tempo give the musical phrases their freer, almost recitative-like character.
The jongo is an Afro-Brazilian dance, similar to the samba. In the State of São Paulo, it is known as tambu, a word which also refers to one of the drums used in jongo and in other similar dances known as batuques. The jongo/tambu choreography features elements of a roda (circle dance) and often includes the umbigada, a dance move in which pairs of dancers touch navels. Interestingly, Guerra-Peixe devoted two movements of this suite to the jongo/tambu: it’s hard to know whether one refers to the dance (the second movement Jongo) and the other to the instrument (the fourth movement Tambu), or whether he felt the terms were not synonymous but referred to two different dances.
Forming a contrast with the other three movements, Recomenda de Almas (‘Commendation of Souls’) recreates one of the most sombre paraliturgical rituals of popular Catholicism. Each Friday night during Lent, men would form a procession to pray for the souls of those condemned to death, those lost in the forests, and those who had died without confession. Traditionally, such processions would travel through a town, stopping at such places as cemeteries and crossroads, where prayers were said and motets or litanies were sung. Guerra-Peixe’s movement begins with slow moving strings in the lower register, clearly representing the men processing at midnight. He contrasts this with strangely high pitched melodies – solos from flute and piccolo, muted trombones and trumpets, the latter accompanied by celesta, seem to exist in a very different world from that of the string accompaniment.