Email
Albuquerque pianist Fred Sturm is honoring the 150th birthday of Brazilian Ernesto Nazareth.
Albuquerque pianist Fred Sturm thought that the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ernesto Nazareth might be a hook for a concert of some of his music.
After all, Nazareth was one of Brazil’s pre-eminent composers of the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.
Sturm’s solo piano concert will be Friday, March 22 at the Outpost Performance Space. The date happens to be two days after the date of Nazareth’s birth.
 |
||
|
If you go WHAT: Pianist Fred Sturm WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday, March 22 WHERE: Outpost Performance Space, 210 Yale SE HOW MUCH: $20 general public, $15 students and Outpost members in advance at the Outpost, by calling 268-0044 or at the door |
|
|
The program opens with three of Nazareth’s Brazilian tangos and closes with three others.
“He played and wrote music in the Chopin style until he was about 30. Then he wrote his first piece in a popular Brazilian vein and called it ‘Tango Brasileiro,’” Sturm said.
Nazareth wrote about 100 Brazilian tangos and was best known for them.
Also on the program is early-20th-century music by Darius Milhaud and Heitor Villa-Lobos.
Milhaud was a French composer who went to Rio de Janeiro in 1917 as the secretary to French ambassador Paul Claudel. Claudel was a poet and the two men had collaborated on works for theater; in Brazil they worked together on a ballet with Amazonian themes, Sturm said.
“Milhaud heard Nazareth play … and I think he was inspired by Nazareth in the writing of the ‘Saudades do Brasil,’” he said.
“Milhaud writes in his autobiography that he arrived in the midst of Carnival and was simply blown away by the sights and sounds. He was also exposed to the landscape.”
Sturm will play eight of Milhaud’s 12 saudades.
He said he likes the notion of a Frenchman going to Rio, being inspired by its popular music, returning to Paris and writing music in a Brazilian style, and pairing that with Villa-Lobos, a Brazilian who came out of his country’s popular music tradition and in the second decade of the 20th century wrote classical music in a French style.
The program includes Villa-Lobos’ “Suite Floral,” which is in a French style, and “A Prole do Bebe,” which includes some Brazilian elements.
“I’ve come to believe that his influence from (Claude) Debussy came by way of Milhaud. I also think, and this is speculation, it is quite possible that Villa-Lobos’ decision to include Brazilian elements came from Milhaud,” Sturm said.
In a May 3 Las Cantantes concert at the University of New Mexico’s Keller Hall, Sturm will play the celeste in Villa-Lobos’ “Quatuor Symbolique.”
Reprint story -- Email the reporter at dsteinberg@abqjournal.com. Call the reporter at 505-823-3925
