Portuguese composer, pianist and musicologist Fernando Lopes-Graça (1906-1994) began his professional career when he was just 14, accompanying silent films in his native Tomar. A piano and composition student at the Lisbon Conservatoire, Lopes-Graça’s musical development took place against a background of intense political upheaval, his internationalist ideals pitting him against António de Oliveira Salazar’s authoritarian regime. Increasing familiarity with the music of Bartók prompted Lopes-Graça’s interest in ‘authentic folklore’, as opposed to state-sanctioned Portuguese folk music. Mário Vieira de Carvalho’s fascinating booklet essay for this Hyperion release left me hungry for more information about this intriguing, overlooked figure.
Luís Duarte’s generous selection of piano music, superbly played and warmly recorded, serves as a perfect Lopes-Graça sampler, the three works here mostly composed between 1950 and 1963. Weightiest are the 11 Glosses on traditional Portuguese songs, from 1950. As with Bartók’s treatments of folk music, the accessibility and rawness of the source material can seem at odds with the sophistication and dissonance of Lopes-Graça’s musical language, though the spikiness and dissonance never completely occlude the folk melodies. Try the third number “Da canção alentejana "Cisirão, Cisirão"”, or the tiny “De uma cantiga bailada ribatejana”. The final gloss begins with a simple, spare hymn tune fragment, Lopes-Graça transforming it into something impossibly grand and imposing over seven minutes.
Three of the 5 Lullabies on traditional Portuguese songs were composed in 1973, completing a sequence begun in 1955. Exquisite, spare miniatures, Duarte’s restraint and eloquence are admirable, especially during the fifth lullaby’s ghostly fade. Lopes-Graça’s Album for the young pianist is delightful, a collection of “21 short pieces of low and moderate difficulty” which sound here like an Iberian Mikrokosmos. Each one is a jewel, the sequence including an explicit homage to Bartók and a startling “little quarrel in toccata style”. I was enthralled by this album. You will be too.