Da Vinci Classics
Gabriele Zanetti, Guido Bombardieri
Physical and Digital Release: 8 September 2017
Guido Bombardieri and Gabriele Zanetti explore South American musical landscapes through clarinet, saxophone and guitar, bringing together dance rhythms, lyrical melodies and contrasting chamber textures.
13.67€
South America Landscapes · Guido Bombardieri & Gabriele Zanetti · 14 tracks
Recorded at Associazione Pasini, Cortefranca (Brescia), on 19 and 26 March 2017. Editing and mixing: Gabriele Zanetti. Timings follow Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music (61:44).
Gabriele Zanetti graduated in guitar from the Luca Marenzio Conservatory in Brescia. Alongside his classical studies, he has maintained an interest in acoustic and electric guitar. He performs with the Mandolin and Guitar Orchestra “Città di Brescia”, directed by Claudio Mandonico, with which he has recorded several albums devoted to composers of the original repertoire. His work as a chamber musician has also led to more than ten recordings.
He wrote the children’s guitar method Musichiamo con la chitarra and published Red Hot Peppers, an essay on the origins of jazz and popular music. His novel Tar and the Guitar of Time explores the history of the guitar through the adventures of a cat. He rediscovered the manuscript of Niccolò Paganini’s Sixth Concerto in its original version for violin and guitar, and edited it for the Japanese publisher Da Vinci.
His extensive teaching activity has included work in the province of Brescia and at the music-oriented secondary school in Adro.
Guido Bombardieri graduated in clarinet from the Conservatory of Mantua in 1991, studying with Savino Acquaviva. He has worked with chamber ensembles as both a clarinettist and a saxophonist. In 1997 he was placed seventh among emerging talents in the annual Top Jazz poll organised by Musica Jazz. He also played lead alto saxophone in the jazz Orchestra Giovanile Italiana.
He performed with Elio e le Storie Tese on the soundtrack of the film Quasi quasi (2002). His appearances at festivals around the world have involved both his own groups and other ensembles. He participated in the Buffa Orchestra production at Teatro Strehler, featuring Antonio Albanese, with texts by Stefano Benni and music by Luca Francesconi.
His jazz collaborations include Gianluigi Trovesi, Enrico Rava, Paolo Fresu, Marco Tamburini, Giorgio Gaslini, Sandro Gibellini, Mike Melillo, Tino Tracanna, Ares Tavolazzi, Rudy Migliardi, Franco D’Andrea, Mauro Beggio, Piero Leveratto and Luis Agudo.
Celso Machado (born in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil, in 1953) is a guitarist, percussionist, multi-instrumentalist and composer. His musical language draws on Afro-Brazilian traditions, popular song and classical guitar, combining rhythmic invention with a wide range of instrumental colours. Raised in a family of musicians, he began with percussion before pursuing classical guitar studies in Brazil.
Based in British Columbia, Canada, he has performed internationally and taught classical guitar around the world. His collaborators have included Sérgio and Odair Assad, Badi Assad, Romero Lubambo, Yamandu Costa and Cristina Azuma. His music reflects both his Brazilian roots and the landscapes and cultural encounters of his adopted home.
Darius Milhaud: (b Marseilles, 4 Sept 1892; d Geneva, 22 June 1974). French composer. He was associated with the avant garde of the 1920s, whose abundant production reflects all musical genres. A pioneer in the use of percussion, polytonality, jazz and aleatory techniques, his music allies lyricism with often complex harmonies. Though his sources of inspiration were many and varied, his music has compelling stylistic unity.
Egberto Gismonti: (b Carmo, 5 Dec 1947). Brazilian composer. He began piano studies at the age of six at the Nova Friburgo Conservatory, studying classical music for 15 years. He moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1968, where he successfully participated in the Third Rio International Song Festival. He then went to Paris to study orchestration and analysis with Nadia Boulanger and composition with Jean Barraqué. After his return to Brazil, Gismonti developed a personal style incorporating Arabian and Italian melodies (his family’s heritage), classical and contemporary music (especially Villa-Lobos and Stravinsky), traditional national genres (folklore, choro, bossa nova), Brazilian Indian themes and jazz. Influenced by the choro, Gismonti taught himself to play the guitar. He has played, recorded and toured throughout the world with several musicians. Since his first recording in 1969 he has made about 50 albums of his own compositions (most released by ECM Records and EMI-Brazil), in which he plays the piano, guitar, various flutes (including Indian instruments), kalimbas and other instruments, winning several prizes. He has also worked as a producer, arranger or player in several other musicians’ recordings. Gismonti’s compositions encompass a great diversity of musical elements and forms, both Brazilian and international, and have been written for solo instruments, ensembles, symphony orchestras, dance, theatre, films, exhibitions and poetic anthologies.
Heitor Villa-Lobos (b Rio de Janeiro, 5 March 1887; d Rio de Janeiro, 17 Nov 1959). Brazilian composer. Heitor Villa-Lobos stands as the single most significant creative figure in 20th-century Brazilian art music. This significance stems not only from his international recognition, but from his achievement in creating unique compositional styles in which contemporary European techniques and reinterpreted elements of national music are combined. His highly successful career stood as a model for subsequent generations of Brazilian composers.
Leo Brouwer: (b Havana, 1 March 1939). Cuban composer, guitarist and conductor. In 1953 he began his studies in the guitar with Isaac Nicola, founder of the Cuban guitar school, and in 1955 he made his performance début. In the same year, and self-taught, he started to compose (e.g. Música para guitarra, cuerdas y percusión and Suite no.1 for guitar); his first works were published in 1956. He was awarded a grant (1959) for advanced guitar studies at the music department of the University of Hartford and for composition at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, where he was taught by Isadora Freed, J. Diemente, Joseph Iadone, Persichetti and Wolpe. In 1960 he started working in cinema, as head of the department of music in the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC); he has written scores for more than 60 films. He was involved in setting up (1969) and running the Grupo de Experimentación Sonora at ICAIC, becoming the teacher and mentor of its members, who included Silvio Rodríguez, Milanés and other important figures of contemporary Cuban music. He worked as musical adviser for Radio Habana Cuba (1960–68) and for other Cuban institutions, and taught counterpoint, harmony and composition at the Conservatorio Municipal in Havana (1960–67). His book Síntesis de la armonía contemporánea was a core text in his classes.
Together with the composers Juan Blanco and Carlos Fariñas and the conductor Manuel Duchesne Cuzán, Brouwer launched the avant-garde music movement in Cuba in the 1960s. He has been the most significant promoter of the bi-annual Havana Concurso y Festival de Guitarra, and in 1981 he was appointed principal conductor of the Cuban National SO. He has also conducted many other foreign orchestras including the Berlin PO and the Orquesta de Córdoba, Spain, which, under his direction, was formed in 1992. He is a member of the Berlin Akademie der Künste, of UNESCO, of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes Nuestra Señora de la Angustias in Granada (1996) and Honoris Causa Professor of Art at the Instituto Superior de Arte de Cuba (1996). For his contribution to the Cuban and international music scenes he was awarded the Orden Félix Varela, the highest honour granted by the Cuban state for culture.
Three phases can be identified in Brouwer’s work: the first, nationalistic (1955–62); the second, avant-garde (1962–7); and a third in which avant garde elements diminish and, particularly after 1980, a creative process described by the composer as ‘new simplicity’ emerges. The first phase is characterized by the use of traditional musical forms, including sonata and variation form, and by tonal harmonic structures rooted in nationalism (e.g. in Homenaje a Manuel de Falla (1957), Tres danzas concertantes (1958) and, Elegía a Jesús Menéndes (1960), among others). During this phase, despite the prevailing use of tonality, a tendency to structural fragmentation may be discerned, as well as the employment of several simultaneous tonal centres, a device that has remained throughout his output.
Though never lacking formal rigour, Brouwer’s works have in general sprung more from a sonic conception: ‘I use any form to help me find musical forms: that of a leaf, of a tree or geometric symbolisms. All these are also musical forms; despite the fact that my works appear very structured, what interests me is sound’. This concentration on the sensory, and an accompanying use of extra-musical formal sources, is most to the fore in Brouwer’s second phase, which was, with the Cuban avant garde in general, heavily influenced by the Polish school; he first heard this music at the Warsaw Autumn in 1961. Variantes for solo percussion and in particular Sonograma I for prepared piano typify this phase, which also included a brief turn towards serialism, in works such as Sonograma II and Arioso (Homenaje a Charles Mingus). Basic materials frequently comprise intervals of the 2nd, 4th and 7th and chords of superimposed 6ths, 9ths, 11ths and 13ths. Complex polyphonic textures dominate, with thematic independence retained within the different planes of sound, and a resultant richness in rhythmic conjunction. Other common devices include pedals, ostinatos, sequences and melodic and rhythmic echoing. One of Brouwer’s most important avant-garde works, which has become a major piece of the guitar literature, is the solo Elogio de la danza (1964). In two movements – Lento and Ostenato – it was originally composed for dance with choreography by Luis Trápaga; it makes reference to primitive dances and to mysticism, and conveys an image of stamping feet and gyrations together with other dance elements.
Between 1967 and 1969 such works as Rem tene verba sequentur, Cántigas del tiempo nuevo and La tradición se rompe …, pero cuesta trabajo approach what would now be the postmodern, characterized by sharply defined contrasts in structure and texture and employing references to various historical periods. In La tradición se rompe …, pero cuesta trabajo, for example, the interpolation and superimposition of elements of such composers as Bach and Beethoven in a suggestive heterophony borders on caricature; further, the participation of the audience is invited with a persistent ‘sh’. All this is integrated into a process of thematic and instrumental development that evolves through a powerful, controlled aleatorism.
In the 1970s Brouwer continued to work on post-serial and aleatory ideas, for instance in La espiral eterna for guitar. But by the 1980s a ‘new simplicity’ had begun to take hold, involving neo-Romantic, minimalist and newly tonal elements. There is a marked lyricism in this third period, the use of varying nuclear cells to generate development, and the return of traditional forms exemplified in works like Canciones remotas, Manuscrito antiguo encontrado en una botella and La región más trasparente.
Manuel Maria Ponce: (b Fresnillo, Zacatecas, 8 Dec 1882; d Mexico City, 24 April 1948). Mexican pianist and composer. He was the leading Mexican musician of his time, and made a primary contribution to the development of a Mexican national style – a style that could embrace, in succession, impressionist and neo-classical influences.
Máximo Diego Pujol (born 7 December 1957) is an Argentine classical guitarist and composer.
Album Notes The multifaceted world of South American music has long represented a mythical, far-reaching horizon for European musicians: a land of fire, an explosion of colours and sounds, the image of a different world, a haven of vitality and an unmistakable melancholy. It offers a human dimension rich in authenticity and spirituality, in which rhythms—often associated with dance—emerge through syncopation and mingle with melancholy melodies. A sense of love awakens the vertigo of sensuality and reveals the vitality of everyday life. South American music is, above all, blood and…
The multifaceted world of South American music has long represented a mythical, far-reaching horizon for European musicians: a land of fire, an explosion of colours and sounds, the image of a different world, a haven of vitality and an unmistakable melancholy. It offers a human dimension rich in authenticity and spirituality, in which rhythms—often associated with dance—emerge through syncopation and mingle with melancholy melodies. A sense of love awakens the vertigo of sensuality and reveals the vitality of everyday life. South American music is, above all, blood and breath: a direct and widely shared means of communicating tangible feelings, an energy directed towards freedom. Its drowsy memories and vital pulses prevail over the technological rhythms of modernity, refreshing a latent vitality and reopening the chambers of the mind where the secrets of the spirit are hidden.
Latin American dances are hybrid forms, born from the encounter between Indigenous traditions and African and European influences. In many African traditions, music and dance are inseparable expressions of communal life, connecting ancestral memory with the vitality of the present. The energy of Latin American music arises from a constant interplay between tradition and modernity: rhythmic pulsation, compelling patterns, sensual passion and the balance between inherited elements and new influences.
In 1517, twenty-five years after Columbus’s first voyage, the Spanish playwright Bartolomé de Torres Naharro referred to a chacota, an early literary reference sometimes associated with the subsequent history of the chaconne. Such references suggest the complex exchange of dance forms between Europe and the Americas, rather than a single, securely documented point of origin. A law promulgated in Spain on 3 August 1583 prohibited singing or playing the zarabanda at home, in the street or elsewhere, prescribing two hundred lashes and, in addition, six years in the galleys for men or exile for women. It reveals the strength of official opposition to the dance, especially from ecclesiastical authorities. Over time, dances such as the habanera, originating in Havana, entered an increasingly international repertoire; the Spanish pasodoble also became part of this wider exchange. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dances from across the Atlantic brought an invigorating variety of rhythms and freedom of movement to European dance culture. The Brazilian maxixe became fashionable in the 1910s, while Argentine tango reached Europe in the early twentieth century. Cuban rumba and the older danzón contributed further to this expanding musical world. Sensual expression and brilliant, engaging rhythms remained a recurring attraction.
Máximo Diego Pujol (Buenos Aires, 1957) is an Argentine composer and guitarist who studied with Abel Carlevaro. His compositions are strongly influenced by Argentine popular traditions and, in particular, by Astor Piazzolla. His work seeks a synthesis of the rhythmic elements of dances such as candombe, tango and milonga. These influences are heard in Dos aires candomberos, represented here by Nubes de Buenos Aires and Candombe de los Buenos Tiempos (tracks 1–2).
The habanera also informs the French composer Darius Milhaud’s vision of Brazil. Milhaud (1892–1974) met the Catholic poet Paul Claudel in 1912, and the two became friends. During the First World War, having been exempted from military service on medical grounds, Milhaud worked in the propaganda department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When Claudel was appointed ambassador to Brazil, he invited Milhaud to become his secretary. Following his stay in Brazil in 1917–1918, Milhaud composed Saudades do Brasil, a suite of twelve dances inspired by Brazilian rhythms and named after places in and around Rio de Janeiro. Corcovado (track 6) is dedicated to Madame Henri Hoppenot, the wife of the French diplomat. Despite its quiet character, its melody is active and seductive. Polytonality emerges through the use of fifths and the Lydian scale. After his Brazilian experience, Milhaud became associated with Les Six, the group linked to Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie. Reacting against prevailing Wagnerian and Impressionist tendencies, its members sought new forms of French musical expression. Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger and Francis Poulenc were among them. Milhaud left an extensive catalogue of more than 450 works, including operas, ballets, incidental and choral music, vocal and instrumental compositions, chamber music and piano works.
Tango emerged in the Río de la Plata region during the late nineteenth century, drawing on several traditions, including the habanera. Its irresistible invitation to dance eventually reached people of different ages and social backgrounds. Syncopation, expressive melodic lines, rhythmic density and the passionate lament of lovers characterise its musical world. Early ensembles included combinations of flute, violin and guitar, alongside other instruments; the bandoneon subsequently became central to the genre. These formations developed into larger groups, including the sextet of two violins, two bandoneons, piano and double bass. In the early twentieth century, tango spread beyond its home region, reaching Europe and the United States. It acquired increasingly complex musical features, including four-beat metres, while retaining connections with candombe and milonga.
Candombe developed within Afro-Uruguayan communities, where enslaved Africans and their descendants maintained connections with ancestral traditions and transformed them into new expressions of collective identity and freedom. Its rich rhythmic fabric is built from complementary drum parts, multiplied into large percussion ensembles in the comparsas lubolas, the carnival groups that take part in the Llamadas. The discipline of recurring rhythmic accents contrasts with improvised interventions by individual percussionists. Candombe has contributed to the broader musical culture of the Río de la Plata and is connected with the histories of tango, milonga and murga, the latter combining music, dance and theatrical performance. It remains a living tradition of Afro-Uruguayan culture, continually developing and reaching new audiences. Tango, by contrast, is often associated with solitude, unease, melodramatic feeling and consuming passion. Its sensual associations have provoked censorship and moral opposition at different moments in its history, yet it has repeatedly found new vitality, including through encounters with jazz.
Jazz and Latin American music have a long history of exchange, with important connections through their African roots. Brazilian music in particular has developed a fertile relationship with jazz, creating traditions in which samba, bossa nova and improvisation meet. Egberto Gismonti (Carmo, 1947), born to a Sicilian father and a Lebanese mother, began playing the piano at six. He is among the musicians who have helped expand the modern conception of jazz. In Paris he studied orchestration and analysis with Nadia Boulanger, while drawing on jazz, choro, bossa nova, rock and the Brazilian classical tradition of Heitor Villa-Lobos. His music synthesises influences from very different musicians: “popular” and “serious” music need not stand in opposition. Loro concludes this recording (track 14).
The Bachianas Brasileiras are nine compositions by Heitor Villa-Lobos (Rio de Janeiro, 1887–1959), written between 1930 and 1945. They bring together Brazilian musical traditions and compositional procedures associated with Bach, suggesting a Brazilian counterpart to the spirit of the Brandenburg Concertos. Bach becomes a mediator between different musical cultures, reflected in the paired titles of many movements: one evokes a European form, the other a Brazilian genre. In the Ária of No. 5 (track 7), Villa-Lobos approaches a modern reimagining of recitar cantando, exploring the relationship between music and poetry through an instrumental accompaniment connected with Brazilian song. His musical imagination was deeply receptive to Brazil’s Indigenous and popular traditions. A thorough knowledge of European music also allowed him to incorporate German, neoclassical and other European elements. His enormous output includes theatrical works, ballets, twelve symphonies, numerous symphonic poems and orchestral suites, five piano concertos, concertos for other solo instruments, seventeen string quartets and a substantial body of further chamber music. Our version of the Dança (track 8) pays a personal tribute to the abrasive, superimposed layers of distorted electric guitars associated with the American composer Glenn Branca.
The music of Manuel María Ponce (Fresnillo, 1882–Mexico City, 1948) can seem deliberately removed from contemporary fashions. A pupil of Paul Dukas in Paris, he retained strong connections with the classical tradition. His nationalist approach attracted attention in Mexico in 1912, anticipating the debates surrounding Villa-Lobos in Brazil. Ponce’s best-known song, Estrellita, dates from 1912 and belongs to the world of his Canciones mexicanas. Although closely connected with Mexican popular idioms, it is an original composition, not an arrangement of a public-domain melody. Its extraordinary circulation in performances and arrangements has made it one of his most enduring works. The Andante espressivo (track 13) comes from the Sonata romántica, written as a tribute to Schubert, a composer with an affection for the guitar; here it is performed by bass clarinet and guitar.
The Cuban composer Juan Leovigildo Brouwer Mezquida, known as Leo Brouwer (Havana, 1939), is a central figure in contemporary guitar music. His work challenges inherited expectations about musical beauty: intensity itself becomes a fundamental artistic value. The essence of his Sonata del Caminante (tracks 9–12), inspired by the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s poem Sigue, lies in opening new paths, patterns and formulas.
Album Notes by Gabriele Zanetti.
Translation by Marco Beccari; English revised for this edition.
Selected awards, reviews and interviews. Radio broadcasts and podcasts are listed separately below.
The Rabbit Room
“evocative, mesmerising, thrilling, romantic and utterly Latin”
The Latin American Fiesta listening feature recommends the duo’s recording of Pujol’s Nubes de Buenos Aires and discusses its expressive character. A selection from this album appears in the editorial playlist.
Explore the coverage ↗ - The Rabbit Room
