Freitas Orchestral Works – Cassuto

Lisbon in the 1930s produced no shortage of would-be nationalists scrounging around for a musical language to call their own, and most of them are forgotten for good reason. Frederico de Freitas is not one of them, or shouldn’t be — this disc, infectious from its first bars to its last, makes the case with a conviction that borders on the reckless.

Here was a man who worked in film, radio, conducting, criticism — the whole grubby, glamorous apparatus of twentieth-century Portuguese musical life — and never seemed to distinguish between “serious” composition and the frank desire to entertain. Good for him. A Dança da Menina Tola — I’ll use the Portuguese, since “The Silly Girl’s Dance” sounds like a Monty Python sketch in English — unfolds an ugly-duckling scenario with an inventiveness that has nothing provincial about it. Freitas writes off-kilter orchestration the way Falla or early Stravinsky might have, tilting the ballet’s rhythms just enough to keep you off balance, letting dance episodes barrel into one another with an almost cinematic jump-cut logic. There’s a village-laughter sequence here that had me sitting up. It doesn’t outdo the great laughing scene in Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé — nothing does — but it belongs in the same conversation, which is no small compliment. When the girl’s beauty is finally revealed near the close, Freitas allows himself real lyrical sweep without once losing the score’s bounce. That’s a difficult trick. Plenty of ballet composers get sentimental and forget to keep dancing.

A Cerca da Muralha — rendered here, awkwardly but who cares, as The Wall of Love — trades the psychological comedy for postcard color, and it’s gorgeous, trashy fun. A folk-flavored trumpet tune announces the village fair with an unmistakable whiff of Falla’s The Three-Cornered Hat, though Freitas’s orchestration is wetter, brighter, more insistently major-key. The plot is pure operetta contrivance: girls loitering by a churchyard wall hoping to be noticed, one forgotten until the last boy finally wanders up. Nobody will mistake it for depth. But the tunes stick, and the scoring glitters like a fairground at night, all brass glint and quick string flurries.

The Medieval Suite is the odd item out, and I say this with real affection: it has almost nothing to do with the Middle Ages. Whatever early-music scholarship Freitas consulted, if any, what emerges sounds like 1950s Iberian pastoral dressed in borrowed robes — attractive, tuneful, occasionally gorgeous in its slow song movements, but about as authentically medieval as a Hollywood epic. The dancing finale is terrific regardless. Take it as fantasy, not reconstruction, and it delights.

Ribatejo closes things out with an exuberant regional dance-portrait — Ribatejo being cattle country north of Lisbon, bullfighters and all — and Freitas hands out solo opportunities like party favors. Nearly every principal in the Royal Scottish National Orchestra gets a moment in the sun. The climaxes are splashy almost to excess, big Technicolor gestures piled one on another. Only in the movement’s middle stretch does the brass turn oddly tentative, thinner and less certain than the confidence the music demands. A small blemish on an otherwise game and colorful interpretation.

Álvaro Cassuto has spent much of his career as the tireless advocate for Portuguese music nobody else will touch, and it shows here in every phrase. He doesn’t just conduct this score, he seems to breathe with it, understanding exactly where the rubato needs room and where the dance rhythms need to snap tight. The engineering favors him: full-bodied, immediate, with enough air around the winds that inner details register even in the thickest tuttis. Turn the volume up past your usual setting and the disc blooms.

Is any of this great music, in the Beethoven-quartet sense? No, and it doesn’t want to be. It wants to charm you, dazzle you a little, send you out humming — and on those terms, unpretentious and thoroughly achieved, it succeeds completely. Seventy minutes of unfashionable pleasure. I’ll take it.