{"id":159535,"date":"2014-11-23T12:56:18","date_gmt":"2014-11-23T14:56:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=159535"},"modified":"2014-12-23T13:15:04","modified_gmt":"2014-12-23T15:15:04","slug":"lifes-moments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/lifes-moments\/","title":{"rendered":"Life\u2019s Moments"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Toni

L\u00e9o Ramos<\/span>Toni (center<\/em>) with Claudio Cruz (left<\/em>) and Paulo \u00c1lvares: mentor to renowned MusiciansL\u00e9o Ramos<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Like the raven in the acclaimed poem by Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849), so can the legacy of conductor, composer and professor Olivier Toni in the world of Brazilian classical music be described as lofty and noble. Mentor to countless renowned musicians, including composers Gilberto Mendes and Willy Corr\u00eaa de Oliveira, conductor and music arranger Rog\u00e9rio Duprat, violinist Fabio Zanon, pianist Andr\u00e9 Mehmari, and conductor and violinist Claudio Cruz, only now, at age 88, are Toni\u2019s own compositions finally on CD. The recordings range from 3 Variations for Orchestra<\/i><\/em> from 1959, an early concert piece that premiered at a 1963 performance by the Bochum Symphony Orchestra, to In Memoriam W. A. Mozart<\/i><\/em>, a piece for solo violin composed in 2012. The CD, featuring Cruz on violin and viola and Paulo \u00c1lvares on piano, was released October 21, 2014 at the Sesc [Social Service of Commerce] in Consola\u00e7\u00e3o.<\/p>\n

Founder of the music department of the University of S\u00e3o Paulo School of Communications and Arts (ECA-USP), the S\u00e3o Paulo Youth Orchestra (later renamed Experimental Repertory Orchestra), the S\u00e3o Paulo Chamber Orchestra, the USP Symphony and Chamber Orchestras, and the Prados Festival in the interior of the State of Minas Gerais almost 30 years ago, Maestro Toni says that these decades of activities allowed little opportunity for him to focus on promoting his work. Willy Corr\u00eaa de Oliveira, writing about his mentor in the CD booklet, compares Toni to Webern (whose body of work was also relatively small) and asks why he composed so infrequently. Oliveira concludes that the Maestro\u2019s students were responsible for \u201cwhat little time he had for his own work.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWriting music demands quiet isolation that allows you to\u00a0 focus on the task. I just wrote a piece less than a month ago, and having to rewrite and delete parts was an enormous chore. It\u2019s not easy when you\u2019re busy doing other things,\u201d says Toni. \u201cI\u2019ve always been quite amused by my friends who think of nothing but recording a CD. But I never bothered with that.\u201d It was Claudia, one of Toni\u2019s daughters, who finally spoke to her father\u2019s friends about getting the project going. Claudio Cruz called the musicians together. \u201cIn the end I was very happy. Some of the orchestral pieces that I wanted recorded were not considered for the disc because of the high cost,\u201d adds Toni.<\/p>\n

\"The

Public domain image <\/span>The cover to the CD: music inspired by Edgar Allen Poe\u2019s The RavenPublic domain image <\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

The Maestro is all too familiar with the difficulty of introducing new repertoires into the concert circuit: trouble not only with the musicians, but also in dealing with a public accustomed to listening to standard works by the same popular composers.\u00a0 This recording owes much to the extraordinary importance of what Willy Corr\u00eaa calls the \u201cmulti-sonorous\u201d quality of Toni\u2019s piano. With the ability to compose using just a few notes, \u201cToni, through his keyboard, weaves new musical patterns, exquisite arabesques, and rhythmic games of high points and dense structures that find their way past the boundary of counterpoint and accompanied melody,\u201d says Corr\u00eaa.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not content to do what others have done,\u201d says the Maestro. \u201cI sometimes can\u2019t make use of certain structures that employ all available notes, but in the final analysis I listen to a structure similar to Villa-Lobos and another to Stravinsky, so I alter some of my own notes and some of Villa-Lobos\u2019, and in the end it\u2019s all the same. My compositions could have a lot of notes, but they will always be the same ones. I use seven instead of 12. Of course, it\u2019s a problem we musicians have: it\u2019s getting to be that more and more, only musicians understand music.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond Expectations
\n<\/b><\/strong>The Sesc-labeled CD takes it title, S\u00f3 Isso e Nada Mais <\/i><\/em>[Just This and Nothing More], from the first track, a piece for voice, double bass, trumpet and string orchestra inspired by Poe\u2019s poem The Raven<\/i><\/em>. Soprano Caroline De Comi sings three stanzas from the Milton Amado translation of Poe, which Toni chose from among the many other classic renditions, including those of Machado de Assis and Fernando Pessoa.<\/p>\n

\u201cI chose the Milton Amado version because it is superb\u2014the most beautiful of all. He conveys the physical scope of Poe\u2019s poem, and in a way I kept to the rhythm of his verse when composing my music. This point is very interesting\u2014I couldn\u2019t alter the meter; otherwise it couldn\u2019t have been sung,\u201d says the Maestro, who emphasizes the extraordinary care he devotes to prosody, a quality that many composers\u2014of both classical and popular music\u2014overlook. \u201cThe raven doesn\u2019t talk, but is always present and in conversation with the song, in those same glissando notes\u2014that strange sound heard at the wondrous moment of a bird\u2019s nocturnal flight.\u201d<\/p>\n

The song sets out to narrate the story, but, ever striving to avoid repeating what has already been done, Toni does the unexpected by exploring Poe\u2019s life, especially the period after the death of his beloved Lenora, when his anguish inspired The Raven<\/i><\/em>. The recording references two examples of startling blasts of trumpet: that of Beethoven\u2019s Leonore Overture No.3 <\/i><\/em>with its characteristic trumpet motif\u2014and \u201cwhich I could not include more than once; and that\u2019s where creativity comes in,\u201d says Toni\u2014and Il Tabarro<\/i><\/em> by Puccini, a composer much admired by Toni. \u201cThe trumpet that precedes the famous monologue is awe-inspiring and that\u2019s why I chose it.\u00a0 I pay tribute to these two composers. The music is military music, it\u2019s not even theirs, but it works incredibly well with Edgar Allen Poe\u2019s poem.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this recording of numerous tributes\u2014to disciples, family members, friends, historical figures, and classical composers like Mozart and Camargo Guarnieri whom the composer admires or who have influenced him\u2014Toni looks to two other literary sources of inspiration for his compositions. One of these, the story of the mythic slave Chico Rei<\/i><\/em>, became his 1994 piece for voice and flute, with verse recitation by Renata Pallotini. The work pays homage to the myth of Zumbi dos Palmares [a legendary slave leader of the 17th<\/sup> Century who, having led a successful revolt of fellow slaves, founded the fugitive colony of Palmares in the Brazilian backlands]\u00a0 \u201cin a manner,\u201d writes the Maestro, \u201ccharacteristic of the Yoruba.\u201d Toni adds that \u201cthere is dance that is loosely inspired on the batuque <\/i><\/em>and African song, not on what is done today.\u201d<\/p>\n

The other composition, Tr\u00eas Instantes da Vida<\/i><\/em> (2009) [Three Moments in Life], takes its inspiration from two poems of Jo\u00e3o Cunha Andrade\u2019s book A \u00c1rvore da Montanha<\/i><\/em> [The Tree on the Mountain]\u00a0\u00a0 Written for voice, flute and percussion, this piece is the last track on the CD and closes the thematic circle of Poe\u2019s poem to the beat of a\u00a0 caixa<\/i><\/em> (percussion instrument), that the Maestro describes as \u201cthe essence of life\u2019s end.\u201d He goes on to say \u201cthe third phase incorporates a part of the poem that in a few words says \u2018that what I love so deeply becomes visible during my final moments\u2019, meaning I don\u2019t want the one for whom I have such love to die before I do; I want to go away with the object of my love still before my eyes. I included this because it\u2019s the way things are with my wife. We\u2019ve been together for 62 years. I don\u2019t want to see her go before I do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Olivier Toni launches first CD featuring his own works ","protected":false},"author":483,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[154],"tags":[248],"coauthors":[796],"class_list":["post-159535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts","tag-music"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/483"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159535\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159535"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=159535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}