**Brasiliana: Three Centuries of Brazilian Music. / Arnaldo Cohen, piano. / BIS CD-1121. Recorded at the former Academy of Music, Stockholm. CD, 71:31.**
The piano literature of Brazil—vast, varied, utterly neglected in most concert halls north of the equator. This disc from BIS makes a compelling case that our ignorance is willful.
Arnaldo Cohen navigates three centuries with the kind of idiomatic authority that comes from living inside this music rather than treating it as exotic curio. His Santoro bristles with carnival energy—those opening “Paulistana” pieces don’t merely suggest Rio’s streets, they practically smell of them. The rhythmic snap in his left hand, the way he leans into syncopations without making them precious—this is playing that understands the difference between authenticity and ethnographic display.
But I confess some reservations about the early repertoire. The Luiz Álvares Pinto solfège lessons from the eighteenth century emerge rather academically under Cohen’s fingers—dutiful more than inspired. Fair enough; they may be pedagogical fossils rather than living art. José Mauricio Nunes Garcia’s “Fantasia para pianoforte no. 4” shows more promise, the right-hand figurations genuinely fluent, yet Cohen’s voicing between the hands feels oddly stiff, almost as if he’s overcompensating for the music’s classical restraint.
Where Brazilian DNA asserts itself most strongly, though, Cohen becomes irresistible. Ernesto Nazareth’s “Odeon—Tango brasileiro” receives a performance of such poise and rhythmic inevitability that you wonder why this piece isn’t standard repertoire everywhere. The "rondo" structure unfolds with deceptive simplicity; Cohen traces the variations with a jeweler’s precision while maintaining the dance’s essential swing. That’s harder than it sounds.
The Villa-Lobos selections—only two tracks, surprisingly—include the substantial “Valsa da dor,” where Cohen’s technical command serves genuine expressive purpose. The piece sprawls across nine minutes, harmonically audacious, and he never loses the thread. His voicing of the inner chromatic lines around 4:23 reveals careful study; most pianists would bury them in pedal.
BIS’s engineering captures the piano in Stockholm’s former Academy of Music with characteristic clarity—perhaps too much clarity for some of the slighter pieces. Chiquinha Gonzaga’s “Gaúcho” and the various valsas by Mignone and Gnattali don’t require such clinical presentation. A touch more ambient warmth might have helped the salon pieces breathe. The sound is exemplary, yes, but also a bit relentless in its transparency.
Paul Myers’s liner notes deserve mention—genuinely informative without the usual record-company puffery. His claim that Brazil “can probably boast more piano music over the past three centuries than virtually any other nation in the world” may be hyperbolic, but the point registers. We’ve been missing something substantial.
The program’s miniature format—most tracks hover around two or three minutes—makes this decidedly light listening despite the occasional harmonic sophistication. You won’t mistake Guarnieri’s “Dança negra” for Brahms, nor should you. The European lineage shows clearly (Henrique Oswald’s “Il neige” could almost be Fauré in tropical exile), but the South American inflections provide the essential character.
Cohen himself seems most at home in the modernist works—the Santoro, the Guerra-Peixe, the later Villa-Lobos. His fingers find the music’s natural speech patterns there. In the nineteenth-century salon pieces, he’s technically secure but perhaps a shade too respectful, as if handling museum artifacts rather than living repertoire.
Still, BIS deserves considerable credit for this anthology. The major labels wouldn’t touch it—too specialized, insufficient name recognition, no obvious marketing angle. Thank goodness someone maintains institutional memory for music that doesn’t fit tidy commercial categories. This recording won’t revolutionize your understanding of piano literature, but it might—should—expand it. Recommended, with the caveat that you’ll need to accept the program on its own terms rather than expecting Romantic profundity. Brazilian piano music has its own logic, its own pleasures. Cohen and BIS make a persuasive case for both.
