Brazil

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Nelson Freire, Piano Virtuoso of Warmth and Finesse, Dies at 77

      by

      Hailing from Brazil as one of the great pianists of the last half of the 20th century, he recalled masters of the first half in his virtuosity. But he shunned the limelight.Nelson Freire, a reclusive pianist whose fabled technique and sensitive, subtle musicianship made him a legend among pianophiles, died on Monday at his home in Rio de Janeiro. He was 77.His manager, Jacques Thelen, confirmed the death. He said Mr. Freire had been suffering from trauma after a fall in 2019, which led to surgery on his upper right arm and left him unable to play.Mr. Freire was one of the greatest pianists of the past half century, possessing a gift that, in its grace of touch and its ease of virtuosity, recalled playing from the great masters of the half-century before that.“You will be hard pressed to find a recital of comparable warmth, affection and finesse,” the critic Bryce Morrison wrote of a Debussy album from Mr. Freire in 2009, in words that might also have spoken for his artistry as a whole. “Here, there is no need for spurious gestures and inflections; everything is given with a supreme naturalness and a perfectly accommodated virtuosity that declare Freire a master pianist throughout.”That Mr. Freire was indeed a master pianist had never been in doubt. A child prodigy, he gave his first performance at 4 and was attracting attention at international competitions before his teens. His playing had a wisdom that critics rarely failed to describe as innate.“There was hardly a single forced or teasing effect, not a sigh of sentimentality, not a line of hectoring rhetoric,” Richard Dyer of The Boston Globe wrote of a recital of Franck, Ravel, Chopin, Villa-Lobos and Liszt in 1977. Mr. Freire, the critic continued, possessed “one of the biggest natural talents for the keyboard that I have ever heard.”Even so, his profile remained relatively limited. Comparisons to Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz abounded, but Mr. Freire was an uncommonly reticent artist, giving fewer concerts than many of his peers, recording only rarely early in his career and remaining indifferent to publicity.“There is a big difference between music and the music business,” he was quoted as saying in a 1992 profile in The Baltimore Sun. “It’s a completely different language, and when I get too involved in talking it, I get a little bit sick. As for talking about myself, it actually bores me.”For much of his career, such reticence reduced aficionados, as The Sun put it, to treat “pirate Freire tapes with the veneration an art historian might accord to a recently rediscovered Rembrandt.”But that began to change in Mr. Freire’s last two decades, when a series of recordings brought him wider attention.“Whether Mr. Freire is shy or merely introspective, it is impossible to say,” Allen Hughes of The New York Times wrote of the pianist’s New York recital debut in 1971. He noted that Mr. Freire had “projected little of his own personality to the audience.”“He was there, he played splendidly and that was it.”Mr. Freire at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009. Critics often noted his self-effacing quality. “He was there, he played splendidly and that was it,” one wrote of a 1971 recital.Rachel Papo for The New York TimesNelson José Pinto Freire was born in Boa Esperança, in southeastern Brazil, on Oct. 18, 1944. His father was a pharmacist, and his mother was a teacher who bought a piano for Nelson’s sister, Nelma, one of four older siblings. Nelson began to play from memory what he had heard Nelma practice. After 12 lessons of his own, each of which involved a four-hour bus ride down dirt tracks, his first teacher said that he had nothing left to teach the boy.The family moved to Rio de Janeiro to find a new mentor; his father gave up his career to work in a bank there. But Nelson, then 6, was an unruly child, unwilling to be taught. With his parents about to give up, they found Lucia Branco, who had trained under Arthur de Greef, a pupil of Franz Liszt’s. Branco placed the boy with her student Nise Obino. “My relationship with her was very strong,” Mr. Freire said of Ms. Obino in 1995, “the strongest in my life.”His break came in 1957, when he entered Rio’s first international piano competition and emerged a finalist. Brazil’s president, Juscelino Kubitschek, offered him a scholarship to study wherever he wanted to. He chose Vienna, and moved there at 14 to work with Bruno Seidlhofer, joining a class that included Rudolf Buchbinder and Martha Argerich, both of whom would go on to major international careers.Ms. Argerich and Mr. Freire became frequent duo partners (and lifelong friends), both in concert and on record, her impulsive, electrifying style blending well with his tonal palette and impeccable timing.“I didn’t do much work,” Mr. Freire nonetheless recalled of his two years in Vienna. He initially spoke no German and remained, after all, a teenager far from home.Little success followed his return to Brazil, until he won first prize at the Vianna da Motta International Music Competition in Lisbon and the Dinu Lipatti Medal, presented in London, in 1964, accelerating his career in Europe.Mr. Freire began recording for Columbia in the late 1960s, taping solo works by Schumann, Brahms and Chopin, as well as a double album of concertos by Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Grieg and Schumann, with Rudolf Kempe conducting the Munich Philharmonic. That album, Time magazine reported in 1970, “caught the critics by surprise and sent them scurrying for superlatives.”Mr. Freire would scarcely return to the recording studio until 2001, after which he embarked on a golden period with Decca that produced nuanced, masterly releases of everything from Bach to Villa-Lobos, one of several Brazilian composers whom he played with pride.Perhaps most valuable were standard-setting discs of the Chopin études, sonatas and nocturnes, as well as Brahms concertos with Riccardo Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.“This is the Brahms piano concerto set we’ve been waiting for,” the critic Jed Distler wrote in Gramophone in 2006, praising it for fusing “immediacy and insight, power and lyricism, and incandescent virtuosity that leaves few details unturned, yet always with the big picture in clear sight.”Mr. Freire is survived by a brother, Nirval. His parents were killed in 1967 when a bus they were using to travel to hear Mr. Freire perform in Belo Horizonte, in their home state of Minas Gerais, plunged into a ravine.Whatever repertoire Mr. Freire turned to, he had a depth of tonal variety, a poetry of phrasing and a natural, almost joyous refinement.In “Nelson Freire,” a 2003 documentary film, he is shown watching a video of a joyous Errol Garner playing jazz piano. “I’ve never seen anyone play with such pleasure,” he said.“That’s how I found the piano,” Mr. Freire continued. “The piano was the moment, when I was little, when I felt pleasure. I’m not happy after a concert if I haven’t felt that kind of pleasure for at least a moment. Classical pianists used to have this joy. Rubinstein had it. Horowitz had it, too. Guiomar Novaes had it, and Martha Argerich has it.”What about you, the interviewer asked?Mr. Freire lit a cigarette, looked up shyly, and smiled. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Memory House’ Review: Seeking a Niche Between Present and Past

      by

      An Indigenous worker in Brazil finds a surreal portal of sorts to the culture of his forebears.While I don’t exactly agree that the worst of times generate the most compelling art, political turmoil can certainly inspire some of the angriest work. Case in point: the recent surge of class-conscious films by a number of Brazilian directors, such as Kleber Mendonça Filho (“Bacurau”), responding to the government’s austerity policies and its willful neglect of the country’s cultural heritage.“Memory House,” by the filmmaker João Paulo Miranda Maria, follows suit in somber and surreal fashion, pitting an aging Indigenous Black man from the rural North against the xenophobic inhabitants of an Austrian enclave in the South.Captured by the cinematographer Benjamin Echazarreta in menacing slow zooms and long, contemplative shots, the film follows Cristovam (the renowned actor Antônio Pitanga), an unfortunate outsider toiling away in a sterile-white milk factory where the employees are overtly likened to the livestock.Stoically withstanding an onslaught of racist encounters — the most devastating of which involves the killing of his three-legged pet dog by a group of white teenagers — Cristovam stumbles upon an abandoned house filled with folkloric relics of his cultural past, which prompt jarring hallucinations that occasionally have violent consequences.Better as a mood piece than a political statement, “Memory House” superficially nods to the bloviating politicians and coldblooded capitalists who dictate the lives of people like Cristovam. As he reconnects with his roots, eventually donning a full bull costume in an act of spiritual reclamation, his white neighbors take on an increasingly homogeneous appearance, suggesting an authoritarian hereafter.Trapped in a hopelessly alienating world, Cristovam would rather buck than surrender; a fatal end would seem inevitable, but wisely, Miranda Maria pulls back the reins with a glimpse of empathy that teases a potential way forward.Memory HouseNot rated. In Portuguese and German, with subtitles. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      A Label Reissued a Dead Brazilian Artist’s Album. He Was Still Alive.

      by

      José Mauro’s first LP, originally released in 1970, became a cult classic. Far Out Recordings is now putting out its follow-up under very different circumstances.In 2016, the British record label Far Out Recordings reissued the debut album by José Mauro, a mysterious Brazilian singer and guitarist whose 1970 LP, “Obnoxious,” had become a cult classic in his home country and with the famed crate diggers Madlib, Floating Points and Gilles Peterson. The album’s press materials noted that the conditions of Mauro’s death, presumed to have occurred in the 1970s, were unexplained. Maybe he perished in an auto accident, or was killed by the military for making what they thought were protest songs.Just one thing, though: Mauro is still alive.He never tangled with Brazil’s military dictatorship and didn’t craft anything close to political music, though his radiant art was seen as an escape. “I was a student, a music student who devoted himself to composing. Simple as that,” Mauro, 72, wrote in an email through a translator. “Nature, that was my thing. Nature and beauty.”On Friday, Far Out, which specializes in Brazilian music, is returning to Mauro’s catalog, reissuing his second and only other album, “A Viagem Das Horas” (“The Journey of the Hours”) — a masterful blend of psychedelic folk and orchestral soul that, while recorded along with Mauro’s debut, wasn’t originally released until six years later. Where “Obnoxious” offered a more straightforward set of guitar-driven bossa nova, the follow-up represented a musical and spiritual awakening for Mauro and his songwriting partner, Ana Maria Bahiana, an author and journalist now living in Los Angeles. Its arrival has forced the label, and others who presumed Mauro dead, to reckon with their mistake.“From a label standpoint, we genuinely believed Mauro was gone, that’s all there is to it really,” Joe Davis, Far Out’s founder, wrote in an email. “There was no reason for us to believe otherwise at the time. As soon as we heard that he was alive, we stopped everything until we spoke with him.” He said the revelation explained the five-year pause between the reissues.Nobody is quite sure why rumors about Mauro’s death began. “I cannot fathom how it came about,” Mauro wrote. “I sort of disappeared due to the vast gap between recording and releasing the albums. But there was no reason to think that I had died!”Davis said that the label learned of Mauro’s supposed demise in 1994, when Mauro’s old producer, Roberto Quartin, informed him of a possible catastrophe involving the singer. “He said he was told that maybe he had a serious motorcycle accident and passed away but wasn’t 100-percent sure,” Davis wrote. Because no one knew where Mauro was — not even the musicians he recorded with — “it led us to believe that was probably the case,” Davis added. (Quartin died in 2004.)But Bahiana knew that wasn’t true. “A motorcycle is the last thing he would have because he hated speed,” she said in a phone interview. “He would drive his father’s car at 20 kilometers per hour.” There was talk that he was arrested and tortured, but “none of this happened,” she said.Bahiana contacted Far Out after the label reissued “Obnoxious”; she knew Mauro was alive but didn’t know where. They eventually contacted Mauro through his nephew, David Butter, who helped facilitate the reissuing of his uncle’s music, and learned Mauro was living on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, spending his days reading and talking to friends.Mauro’s story began in a farmstead in Jacarepaguá, in the West Zone of Rio. He was raised in a musical household; his father liked to sing and his great-grandfather was a small-town maestro. Mauro started playing the accordion when he was 6; nine years later, he was given an acoustic guitar, even though he wanted a piano. “My father was not able to buy one at the time,” he wrote. He fell in love with the guitar and studied piano at ProArte, a prestigious music school in Rio.His guitar teachers included the Brazilian luminaries Baden Powell, Roberto Menescal and Wanda Sá, and he learned how to compose songs from Wilma Graça, the noted concert pianist. At ProArte, Mauro infused classical elements into his guitar playing, taking his music from an understated rustic style and giving it a more robust sound. He fell in love with music and didn’t turn back.“Music became an ally, and I was pleased about that,” he wrote. “There was no bigger joy to me than taking the guitar and composing by intuition. Music came to me as a gift, as a natural gift.”Mauro started listening to American singer-songwriters (Bob Dylan, Jim Croce and James Taylor), and to jazz and blues singers (Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan). Among Brazilian musicians, he particularly liked the melodic soul that Edu Lobo, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Milton Nascimento were making. The varied influences helped Mauro forge his own sound, meant to elicit peace and contemplation.“My style is very personal,” he wrote. “I’ve always felt like a natural-born musician, carrying songs inside me. I was willing to give my best to the world without relinquishing my composing style.” He wrote songs in his room, looking out the window, staring at the nearby Atlantic Rainforest, where he observed animals, butterflies and birds: “When I felt in a creative mood, I turned the tape recorder on and started composing.”He impressed Quartin, his would-be producer, by playing a waltz he had just composed on guitar after dinner at a mutual friend’s house. Soon after, he was introduced to Bahiana through a friend of hers, and visited his future collaborator at her house in Ipanema. The two started writing hundreds of songs for what would become “Obnoxious” and “A Viagem Das Horas.”“We clicked right away,” Bahiana said. “I loved his music. It was easy for me to find words to his songs.”Quartin, a local producer and label head who’d released some 20 albums through his Forma imprint, selected the songs he liked and put Mauro and Bahiana in the studio with Lindolfo Gaya, who worked on song arrangements and conducted the orchestra. “Obnoxious” was released to little fanfare; Quartin lost interest in putting out “A Viagem Das Horas” and sold it off.“You know the labels that just do ‘Best Songs from the ’40s,’ ‘Your Favorite Jingles,’ that type of thing?” Bahiana said. “He ended up selling the second album to a company like that, who trashed it, basically. And that was the end of the story for us.” Bahiana went back to college and followed her passion for writing. Mauro stayed in Rio, teaching guitar and composing music for theater.Mauro said that the six-year wait between albums broke his will to compose more songs: “It felt like centuries,” he wrote. He has no doubt that he and Bahiana generated enough music to release another two LPs. Dismayed with the industry, he eventually opted for a quiet existence. As he got older, he had to stop playing the guitar altogether: Mauro was diagnosed with early-stage Parkinson’s disease. Now his trembling hands won’t allow him to strum the instrument at all. (“And to complicate things further, people took me for dead,” he wrote.)Despite losing his creative spark, Mauro isn’t focused on regret. That the music still sounds just as vibrant today as it did four decades ago is good enough for him.The same goes for Bahiana, who relishes the purity of the music. “It is his soul talking,” she said. “There’s no gimmicks there, no ‘I’m going to write this because it’s a trend.’ It’s exactly the way we composed, the way we showed his spirit. His heart is there.” More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      How 8 Countries Have Tried to Keep Artists Afloat During Panemic

      by

      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesA Future With CoronavirusVaccine InformationF.A.Q.TimelineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHow 8 Countries Have Tried to Keep Artists AfloatGovernments around the world have tried to support the arts during the pandemic, some more generously than others.While South Korea largely contained the spread of coronavirus last year — “The Phantom of the Opera” in Seoul closed for only three weeks — the government still provided some $280 million in pandemic relief for cultural institutions.Credit…Woohae Cho for The New York TimesJan. 13, 2021Updated 5:23 a.m. ETIn December, owners and operators of theaters and music halls across the United States breathed a sigh of relief when Congress passed the latest coronavirus aid package, which finally set aside $15 billion to help desperate cultural venues. But that came more than six months after a host of other countries had taken steps to buffer the strain of the pandemic on the arts and artists. Here are the highlights, and missteps, from eight countries’ efforts.FrancePresident Emmanuel Macron of France was one of the first world leaders to act to help freelance workers in the arts. The country has long had a special unemployment system for performing artists that recognizes the seasonality of such work and helps even out freelancers’ pay during fallow stretches. In May, Mr. Macron removed a minimum requirement of hours worked for those who had previously qualified for the aid. He also set up government insurance for TV and film shoots to deal with the threat of closure caused by the pandemic. Other countries, including Britain, quickly copied the move.GermanyGermany’s cultural life has always been heavily subsidized, something that insulated many arts institutions from the pandemic’s impact. But in June, the government announced a $1.2 billion fund to get cultural life restarted, including money directed to such projects as helping venues upgrade their ventilation systems. And more assistance is on the way. Germany’s finance ministry intends to launch two new funds: one to pay a bonus to organizers of smaller cultural events (those intended for up to a few hundred people), so they can be profitable even with social distancing, and another to provide insurance for larger events (for several thousand attendees) to mitigate the risk of cancellation. Germany is not the first to implement such measures; Austria introduced event insurance in January.BritainIn July, the British government announced a cultural bailout package worth about $2.1 billion — money that saved thousands of theaters, comedy clubs and music venues from closure. In December, several major institutions, including the National Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company, were also given long-term loans under the package. Even with the help, there have already been around 4,000 layoffs at British museums alone, and more in other sectors.The National Theater in London was one of several major institutions to receive a long-term loan from the British government in December.Credit…Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesPolandEuropean cultural aid hasn’t been enacted without controversy. In November, Poland announced recipients of a $100 million fund meant to compensate dance, music and theater companies for earnings lost because of restrictions during the pandemic. But the plan was immediately attacked by some news outlets for giving money to “the famous and rich,” including pop stars and their management. The complaints prompted the culture minister to announce an urgent review of all payments, but the government ultimately defended them, and made only minor changes.The Coronavirus Outbreak More