Gomes: Opera Overtures & Preludes

Album review

Who was the first composer from the Americas to gain widespread acclaim in Europe? It was not a North American but the Brazilian Carlos Gomes, who was hailed as the successor to Verdi after the success of his opera Il Guarany in Italy in 1870. Both Verdi and Liszt admired him, and unlike some of his Italian competitors, he was more than a one-hit wonder. Some of his works even contained Brazilian vernacular influences, but those are little in evidence in this collection of operatic preludes and overtures from the Minas Gerais Philharmonic Orchestra under conductor Fabio Mechetti. Instead, the style is basically Verdian, with a blood-and-guts quality that differs from the elegant proportions of the model. Two of the operas from which the music is taken, Il Guarany and Lo Schiavo, the latter dealing with the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888, are set in Brazil; the rest are on European historical themes, with one, Condor, set in Samarkand. The fourth-act prelude from Lo Schiavo, depicting dawn, is often played as an orchestral showpiece, at least in Brazil itself. The music throughout is strong enough to make one hope someone revives one of the actual operas, and the orchestra invests the scores with the proper urgency and intensity. This release made classical best-seller charts in the spring of 2023, vindicating the Brazilian foreign affairs ministry project of which it is part; the series "The Music of Brazil" seeks to popularize forgotten monuments of Brazilian music, and this is all to the good.
© James Manheim /TiVo