Radamés Gnattali

Radamés Gnattali (Porto Alegre, 27 January 1906 – Rio de Janeiro, 3 February 1988) was a Brazilian composer, pianist and conductor whose output moves between concert music and popular music. The son of a music teacher, he received musical training from an early age. From 1920 he studied at the Institute of Fine Arts of Rio Grande do Sul, where he won the gold medal for piano in 1924, and later at the National Music Institute in Rio de Janeiro. He was largely self-taught in composition.

His first professional steps were as a pianist and, later, as violist of the Henrique Oswald Quartet. Settling permanently in Rio de Janeiro, he became the official conductor of the Radio Nacional orchestra. His popularity grew thanks to the music he wrote for radio serials and to his skilful arrangements and orchestrations of fashionable songs and dance rhythms. This success was detrimental to his parallel career as a composer of serious music, although his work in the popular field proved valuable in his search for a nationalist idiom.

In his first period (1931–1940) that familiarity with popular music is clearly evident, with distinct national influences and a post-Romantic language, as in the Rapsódia brasileira (1931) or the Trio with piano (1933). Some works of this period incorporate harmonic formulas and instrumentation characteristic of jazz. Around 1945, the year he was elected a founding member of the Brazilian Academy of Music, he began a second phase of more subjective nationalism, expressed through more restrained and simpler means. The Brasilianas illustrate this range of approaches well; No. 2 (1948), for example, skilfully stylises various types of samba.

During the 1950s he deliberately moved away from musical nationalism and turned to neo-Romantic and neoclassical models, without giving up a light style associated with symphonic jazz. The four concertinos for guitar, the Sinfonia popular and the concerto for harmonica are examples of this phase. In the 1960s he deepened his assimilation of folk and popular traditions, as shown in the Conciertos cariocas and the Cuarteto popular, and the Second Violin Concerto (1962) successfully experiments with rhythmic patterns from the bossa nova. In his last twenty years he returned to a direct nationalist style, achieving great success as an arranger and conductor for television in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, and composed numerous popular pieces.

His legacy includes a work for guitar regarded as one of the most significant in the Brazilian repertoire for that instrument, as well as an extensive output of songs, among them Azulão and Oração da Estrela Boieira, which are counted among his most accomplished.