Georgina Rossi & Silvie Cheng: Chorinho
Navona Records

Having earlier given their attention to music from Chile on 2020's New Focus Recordings release Mobili, violist Georgina Rossi and pianist Silvie Cheng now turn to music from Brazil. No such collection would be complete without a piece by Heitor Villa-Lobos, of course, but the Chilean-American violist and Tokyo-born, Chinese-Canadian pianist add to their release with world-premiere recordings by João de Souza Lima, Lindembergue Cardoso, and Ernani Aguiar. The programme sees multi-part works appear alongside single-movement pieces and duet performances couple with ones for solo piano and solo viola.

Chorinho was laid down at Mount Vernon's Oktaven Audio in August 2022, but the musical partners channel the spirit of South America's largest country into consistently strong performances. Rossi and Cheng have a great head start in this case when the compositions by the composers are already so alluring all that's required is to illuminate them with performances of conviction, something the two do throughout. Of the seven twentieth-century composers whose works are presented, only one, Aguiar (b. 1950), is still with us.

The tone is ably set by the title piece, Lima's only known work for viola. Though the word choro is, in part, associated with music of a forlorn character, Chorinho largely brims with effervescence and affirmation, qualities brought into sharp relief by the vitality of the duo's rendering. Written in 1977, Appassionato, Cantilena, e Toccata by the São Paulo-born Osvaldo Lacerda follows. Boldly chromatic in the way the composer weaves vestiges of dissonance into an emotionally expressive fabric, the material is representative of Lacerda's refined neoclassicism. As it progresses through three contrasting movements (compare the lamenting “Catilena” to the rousing “Toccata”), the work reveals itself to be intellectually rigorous yet heartfelt and passionate.

Rossi is unaccompanied for the fifth of the fourteen Meloritmias Aguiar composed for various solo instruments, this three-parter, written in 1987, the only one for viola. Still, while only one instrument appears, the impression created is of two voices when the lines are so contrapuntal. After the prélude-like “Ponteando” initiates the work, Rossi expertly deploys double stops in “Resposta ao bilhete do jorgralrrapeixe” to help approximate the sound of the rabeca, a fiddle originating in Portugal. The closing movement, “Convite ao amigo Cristiano Ribeiro,” moves us far away from Brazil in its referencing of material from Henri Casadesus's Viola Concerto in the Style of J. C. Bach. Cheng's moment in the spotlight arrives with Villa-Lobos's Valsa da dor (1932), whose title translates as “waltz of sorrow”; certainly a sense of grief informs the doleful setting, though there are a few animated moments too. Rossi makes a second solo appearance with a towering performance of Pequeno Estudio (1981), the sole work for viola written by the Bahía-born Cardoso.

November 2023