Camerístico

Album review

Here's a fine guitar disc for those who love the guitar but are looking for something new, outside the mainstreams of Baroque music, classics from the Latin world, pop tunes, and tango. The chief virtue of the program offered by Brazilian guitarist Marco Pereira is its variety: it includes guitar-and-orchestra pieces, one with an added solo mandolin; a trio for flute, guitar, and cello; a quintet for those three instruments plus vibraphone and clarinet; and a four-guitar quartet. All the music is either composed or arranged by Pereira, but it, too, is varied: with a vigorous early twentieth century idiom in the smaller pieces juxatposed with sweeping, cinematic treatments in the orchestral music. Two of the pieces, Violão vadio (track 2) and Suite das águas (track 4), are arrangments of tunes by two very different composers, Brazilian guitarist Baden Powell in the former case, and Dorival Caymmi, the man who taught Carmen Miranda how to swivel her hips, in the latter. Pereira himself is a compelling guitarist, capable of playing long stretches of passagework with riveting tension. Several of the pieces begin with slow music that sets the mood, proceeding to a faster section with technical challenges. But even this conventional framework is handled differently each time it appears. Brazilian guitar music is known outside its home country for a few celebrated figures like the Assad brothers (who, like Sherlock Holmes, have an arguably even more talented sibling, sister Badi Assad), but those figures emerged from a musical culture in which the classical guitar is deeply rooted. This disc appears to be aimed mostly at a Brazilian market, for the notes and tracklist are exclusively in Portuguese . It makes one want to explore Brazil's homegrown guitar scene in greater detail.

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