Francisco Mignone

Francisco Mignone was born in São Paulo in 1897 to Italian immigrant parents and started out playing flute and piano in the city's popular music scene, publishing dance tunes under a pen name. Formal studies took him to the conservatory in Milan, and for a while he wrote in an Italian operatic vein.

Back home, spurred by the writer Mário de Andrade and the nationalist movement in Brazilian art, he turned to the music around him: choro, street serenades, Afro-Brazilian dance and ritual. He settled in Rio de Janeiro, where he taught for decades and became, alongside Villa-Lobos, a leading voice of Brazilian concert music. He died in Rio in 1986.

Start with Festa das igrejas, his orchestral impressions of four Brazilian churches, grand and glowing. Then hear the other side of him in the Valsa de esquina no. 1 for piano, a wistful "street-corner waltz" in the spirit of Rio's serenaders.