Brazilian pianists enchant La Roque-d’Anthéron

Special envoy to La Roque-d’Anthéron (Bouches-du-Rhône)

The photos scroll to the rhythm of Gluck’s little melody. The camera fixes his face in close-up. Behind those long eyelashes, which so fascinated Martha Argerich the day they first met, her clear eyes of “blissful spirit” misted with tears. Is he thinking of the one playing on the recording? Her heroine, Guiomar Novaes, “passion of a life since childhood”? To this childhood, where “loneliness has always been there”, as confirmed by a heartbreaking letter from his father, a few shots later. Unless he is thinking of music. To these three minutes of a moment of grace taken fromOrfeo and euridicearranged by the virtuoso Giovanni Sgambati in the 19th^e century.

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These thirty-eight very simple measures, Nelson Freire had made a favorite encore. And it is with the same devotion, such a natural sense of cantabile and a beautiful palette of restrained but frank colors, that Juliana Steinbach took up the torch on August 7…