Claudio Santoro

condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Gatefold sleeve. Insert included.

A document of one of the twentieth century's most restlessly evolving musical intelligences. Claudio Santoro (1919-1989) is among the indispensable figures of Brazilian art music, and one whose work has never been adequately absorbed into the international canon. His trajectory - from the dodecaphonic works of the 1940s, shaped by studies under Hermann Scherchen and the encounter with serial technique, to the nationalist period of the 1950s and the later return to an expanded modernism - mirrors the contradictions of Brazilian cultural politics across the century's midpoint with uncomfortable precision.

Issued by RBM and directed toward a German-speaking audience encountering his work through the broader frame of twentieth-century music, this LP presents Santoro's compositions in a context that underscores their European affinities without erasing the specifically Brazilian tensions at their core. The rhythmic intelligence, the lyrical pressure, the weight of a musical identity negotiating between international modernism and local inheritance - all of it present, and all of it resistant to easy classification. A necessary encounter with a composer who deserves to be far better known on this side of the Atlantic. RBM Records, RBM 3005.