Freitas Orchestral Works – Cassuto

Somewhere in the vast unindexed attic of twentieth-century European music there is a room reserved for composers who wrote beautifully, pleased their audiences, held down serious institutional jobs, and then vanished from the collective memory the moment the obituaries stopped running. Frederico de Freitas belongs in that room, and this new Naxos disc — Álvaro Cassuto leading the Royal Scottish National Orchestra with evident affection — makes a persuasive case that the door ought to be reopened.

Outside Portugal, de Freitas is a cipher. He conducted, he taught plainchant at the Centre for Gregorian Studies in Lisbon, he founded a choral society, and — almost incidentally, it seems — he composed a catalog large enough to keep a completist busy for years. Some of it circulated decades ago on recordings made in Hungary, released on the Portugalsom label, mostly ignored outside specialist circles. This disc gathers four scores spanning two productive decades, 1938 to 1958, and the picture that emerges is of a craftsman entirely comfortable in his own skin. No anxiety of influence, no striving after modernist credentials. Just abundant, well-turned invention.

The Silly Girl’s Dance, from 1941, opens with a piccolo tune so slight and so charming you barely notice it’s doing structural work. It keeps returning, transformed, needling its way through the ballet’s episodic scheme like a half-remembered nursery rhyme. There’s real cunning in how de Freitas deploys it. The orchestration throughout is bright without being garish: winds get the good tunes, strings provide cushioning rather than argument, and the percussion knows when to stay out of the way.

The Wall of Love, a year older, shares the family resemblance — folk-flavored melody, sectional construction, a certain Gallic wit that suggests de Freitas had absorbed his Milhaud (minus the polytonal astringency) and perhaps a stray page or two of Falla. You can hear Stravinsky’s neoclassical ballets somewhere in the rhythmic profile too, though filtered through a distinctly Iberian sensibility, less angular, warmer in harmony, never quite willing to let dissonance sting for long. None of this is a knock. Influence absorbed this gracefully stops being imitation and becomes simply style.

Ribatejo, the earliest piece here (1938), is the disc’s charm bracelet: eight minutes of regional color, its brass fanfares and dance rhythms evoking the bullring country after which it’s named. There’s a passage, I won’t pretend I caught it on first listen, it crept up on the second pass, where the woodwind writing tips its hat to Chabrier, that same effervescent, slightly tipsy joy you get in España. Coincidence, probably. Delightful regardless.

The real substance of the program, though, is the Medieval Suite of 1958, composed as a kind of palate-cleanser after de Freitas finished his opera A Igreja do Mar. He wanted, by his own account, something simpler and lighter, inspired by what he called the fragrance of medieval Portuguese poetry. Simpler it may be by comparison with an opera, but “light” undersells it. The fourth movement, “Cantar de Amigo,” stopped me cold: a long-breathed melodic line, modally inflected, scored with a spareness that lets real feeling through without any sentimental push. It’s the kind of movement that makes you want to track down whatever poem prompted it and read it in the original.

Cassuto, Portuguese himself and long an advocate for his country’s neglected repertoire, conducts with unforced idiomatic ease. Tempos feel unhurried but never slack, and transitions between the suite’s contrasting episodes are handled with a sure hand. The RSNO plays with more polish than warmth in places, the string tone occasionally a shade cool for music this frankly emotional, but the woodwind solos throughout, that opening piccolo, the oboe in the Medieval Suite, have real personality. Naxos’s engineering is clean, well-balanced, if not especially plush. You hear detail rather than atmosphere.

Is any of this great music, in the sense we reserve for Villa-Lobos or Falla at their best? No. And I don’t think de Freitas would have claimed otherwise. But greatness isn’t the only virtue worth prizing on a Tuesday evening with the lights down. This is music that knows exactly what it wants to do and does it without fuss, without pretension, without apology. Recommended, and warmly. A small, genuine discovery.