Joly Braga Santos: Orchestral Music for Strings Concerto for Strings in D (1951); Sinfonietta for Strings (1963); Variations Concertantes for Strings and Harp (1967); Concerto for Violin, Cello, Strings and Harp (1967) Bradley Creswick, violin; Alexander Somov,; cello; Sue Blair, harp Northern Sinfonia/Álvaro Cassuto Brilliant Classics (67:51) The late Joly Braga Santos—he died suddenly in 1988, barely sixty—remains something of a puzzle even now, decades after Marco Polo began their essential excavation of his music. This reissue on Brilliant of what was originally a 2002 Marco Polo release doesn’t solve the puzzle, exactly, but it does suggest that the contradictions in his output aren’t signs of weakness but rather evidence of a restless, questing intelligence. The gulf between the confident modal writing of the early Concerto for Strings in D and the introspective, nearly atonal language of the 1967 works is…
well — it’s enormous. Disconcerting, even. You hear the 1951 Concerto—all Kodály-inflected vigor and Vaughan Williams-like pastoral expansiveness—and wonder how the same composer could have written the austere, Martin-esque Sinfonietta just twelve years later.
But then you remember Bartók’s journey, or Sessions’s, and perhaps the arc seems less peculiar. Portuguese composers of Braga Santos’s generation didn’t have the luxury of stylistic consistency; they were playing catch-up with modernism while trying to forge something authentically their own. The Concerto in D is the most immediately appealing work here, and it’s a genuine discovery for anyone who treasures the central European string repertoire.
Three movements, classical in outline but thoroughly twentieth-century in their modal harmonies and rhythmic drive. The slow movement—played at the composer’s funeral, we’re told—has that particular quality of elegiac restraint that marks the best Portuguese music, a kind of saudade without the sentimentality. Álvaro Cassuto, who worked closely with Braga Santos and knows this idiom from the inside, draws playing of real incisiveness from the Northern Sinfonia.
The attack is clean, the phrasing shapely, the tonal blend warm without being woolly. Where things get interesting—and more difficult—is in the later works. The Sinfonietta inhabits a much darker world.
The lyricism is still there, but it’s twisted, chromatic, almost tortured. This isn’t the comfortable neoclassicism of the Concerto; it’s closer to the bleak poetry of late Martinů or the string works of Frank Martin. Cassuto navigates these treacherous harmonic waters with complete assurance, and the Northern Sinfonia responds with playing that’s both committed and technically secure.
I confess I found the work forbidding on first hearing—all those sudden tempo shifts, the almost obsessive rhythmic drive—but it deepens considerably on acquaintance. The two 1967 works for strings and harp present yet another Braga Santos. The Variations Concertantes are enigmatic, highly compressed, perhaps too much so for their own good.
Sue Blair’s harp adds a silvery shimmer to the string textures, but the work’s logic remains elusive even after several hearings. The Concerto for Violin, Cello, Strings and Harp is more successful, I think—a double concerto in the baroque sense, with Bradley Creswick and Alexander Somov emerging from the ensemble rather than dominating it. Both soloists understand that this isn’t about virtuoso display; they pitch their contributions exactly right, technically accomplished but never showy.
The release, made at the Jubilee Theatre in Gosforth in 2001, is generally clear and — well — — well-balanced, though it does get a bit congested in the loudest passages of the Sinfonietta. Not a major problem, but noticeable. Cassuto’s annotations are models of their kind—detailed, enlightening, written by someone who actually understands the music from the inside.
They’re particularly valuable for the 1967 works, which really do need some contextual guidance. The question of whether Braga Santos deserves to be counted among “the indisputably great 20th century composers”—as the original reviewer claimed—is perhaps beside the point. What matters is that this is music of genuine quality and considerable interest, written by a composer who refused to stand still.
That particular brightness of period instruments catches the ear.
The stylistic inconsistencies that might seem like weaknesses are actually evidence of integrity; as the Portuguese critic João de Freitas Branco observed, Braga Santos distinguished “between being the first to do this or that, and the only one to do it this way.”
Anyone who responds to Vaughan Williams, Kodály, or Frank Martin should investigate this disc. The early Concerto alone is worth the price of admission, and the later works—difficult as — they are—reveal a composer of real substance grappling with the fundamental questions of his art. Cassuto and — well — the Northern Sinfonia make as strong a case for this repertoire as anyone could.
