Cuban-Italian pianist Marcos Madrigal is releasing a double album of 20th-century Brazilian piano music on April 17. The album marks the debut of the newly founded Habanero record company — and stakes out an ambitious vision for what the label intends.
The album, which was released in Paris last month, features work by two towering figures of Brazilian classical music: Cláudio Santoro and Heitor Villa-Lobos. It is the first in what Habanero intends as a series of recordings exploring the depth and complexity of the Latin American musical imagination. Pierre-Yves Lascar, a producer associated with contemporary music and the owner of the French company Artalinna, brings the Habanero project to life, establishing the company.
Santoro: An overlooked master
The program opens with Santoro (1919–1989), a composer largely overlooked outside Brazil despite occupying a central place in his country’s musical history. His Paulistanas (1952–53) and Prelúdios showcase a tightly controlled compositional style that resists easy categorization. Santoro draws on Brazilian folk traditions not as surface decoration or national sentiment, but as structural raw material — popular references absorbed so deeply into the writing that they function more as architecture than ornament.
The pieces are compact and intense. In the Prelúdios, conceived partly as spontaneous pianistic gesture, the writing has an intimate, almost confessional quality, with a strong melodic voice that seems to sing through the instrument. The Paulistanas strike a unique balance, setting lyrical melody against sharply accented rhythms in a way that reflects the turbulent state of Brazilian nationalism at mid-century — a culture redefining its own identity in the aftermath of modernism.
The two sets reveal a language of aphoristic style, characterized by short forms, with subtle transformations affecting melodic ideas.
Villa-Lobos: A synthesis and expansion of the pianistic language
The second half of the album turns to Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959), the most internationally recognized figure in Brazilian classical music. In addition, Villa-Lobos was one of the defining composers of 20th-century Latin America. The album features three major works: the Ciclo brasileiro, the Bachiana Brasileira No. 4, and Chôros No. 5 “Alma Brasileira.”
Together they showcase Villa-Lobos’s singular achievement: the fusion of European traditional techniques with Brazilian musical practices. The Bachianas Brasileiras series reimagines Bach’s legacy through a distinctly Brazilian lens. Baroque structural procedures coexist with melody and rhythm rooted in Brazilian rural traditions, producing music that feels simultaneously ancient and new.
The Ciclo brasileiro takes a different angle, conjuring images of rural life and the textures of identity in a country of vast geographic and cultural diversity. Chôros No. 5, subtitled Alma Brasileira distills this sensibility into its most concentrated form: a piece that seems to reach for something almost archetypal in the Brazilian sensibility.
A poetics of Latin American resonance
What makes the album more than a repertoire of two composers is the interpretation running through it. Madrigal frames the two composers works as a dialogue between those who share a conception of music as a duality between tradition and modernity, the local and the universal.
Both were working in an era when Latin American composers faced a genuine intellectual challenge: how to seriously engage with the Europeans without surrendering a distinct cultural identity; how to draw on folk and popular material without reducing it to folklore. The answers were different in character but related in spirit. Listening to them in sequence sharpens the sense of a shared artistic project.
Cuban musicologist Claudia Fallarero explores these connections in depth, drawing on both research and musical analysis in the booklet that accompanies the album. She traces the links held between aesthetics, identity, and the construction of musical discourse within Latin America in the 20th century.
Ms. Fallarero describes Madrigal’s interpretations of these two Brazilian composers:
“This is why Madrigal resonates so completely with the essence of the Brazilians. He understands the lament of their melodic lines, the implied flexibility of their agogics, the interweaving of layers of sound between melody and accompaniment, as though they were dealing with juxtaposed spaces and articulating the layers of Latin American society.”
Madrigal’s interpretive approach
Madrigal has described his interpretive philosophy as one that treats the piano as an “essentially vocal instrument.” This approach shapes his interpretation of both composers throughout the album.
For a debut release, it is a bold statement of intent — from a pianist, a musicologist, and the Habanero label announcing that Latin American classical music has more to say than the traditional concert repertoire has revealed.
On the motivation for Madrigal’s choice of these two Brazilian composers, Santoro and Villas-Lobos, for the launch album of Habanero, he said:
“The selection of the repertoire was particularly meaningful. From an early age, I had long wished to record Chôros No. 5 by Villa-Lobos. More broadly, the work of Heitor Villa-Lobos represents, for Latin American pianists, a true milestone within the continent’s pianistic canon.
The recording label, and more specifically Pierre-Yves Lascar, proposed to me a project centered on the music of Claudio Santoro, a composer with whose work I must admit I was, at that time, largely unfamiliar. Approaching his oeuvre felt like the discovery of a hidden treasure. I was immediately drawn to the richness and expressive depth of his writing, and it soon became clear to me that pairing Santoro with Villa-Lobos would offer a compelling and coherent framework for a first exploration of Brazilian piano music.”
The album release will be available on all digital platforms on April 17.
T.K. Hernández is co-founder and editor at Cuba Business Report. Her work has been published in various online news media publications. Hernández has supported fundraising for Cuba’s last two hurricane disaster relief campaigns and is a member of the Canadian Network on Cuba. She is also a member of The Writers Union of Canada, and ACES International Alliance of Editors. Ms. Hernández is the author of three books, most recently, “The Cuba Interviews: Conversations on Foreign Investment and Economic Development,” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
