Kansas Virtuosi: Salgado

The Strad Issue: July 2025

Description: A follow-up album does full justice to an eclectic Ecuadorian

Musicians: Kansas Virtuosi

Works: Salgado: Chamber Music vol.2

Catalogue number: NAXOS 8579171

The Naxos ‘Music in Brazil’ series has paraded a carnival of eclecticism in the work of Francisco Mignone, Claudio Santoro and others. Tango, Neoclassicism, jazz and modernism all find their place, sometimes within the same work. It isn’t meant to patronise Luis Humberto Salgado (1903–77) to suggest that he writes as an Ecuadorean satellite to his Brazilian contemporaries. You could hardly imagine from the album’s opening pair of village party pieces that the following 12-tone piano version of a native dance, Sanjuanito futurista, could be the work of the same composer. Yet Salgado wrote them all between 1938 and 1944.

Violinist David Colwell puts on a stylish salon suit for a delicious postwar pair of palm-court miniatures, Anhelo and Nocturno. Then it’s black polo-neck time again for the Violin Sonata of 1961, or so you’d expect from its spidery opening gambit. Fusion may be a dirty word these days, but Salgado brings off late-Romantic violin writing as a natural counterpart to the spiky Bartókiana mostly emanating from Ellen Sommer at the piano.

At almost 20 minutes, the Piano Quintet is the album’s most substantial work. From 1973, though not ostensibly ‘late’ in idiom, it draws on Brahmsian archetypes for a dialogue of piano and strings. Then, around two minutes in, Brahms walks into a bar in Quito, sits down with a beer and enjoys watching a local dancer strut her stuff. The recording itself is a drawback – dull and boomy – but not enough to compromise seriously the polished advocacy of the Kansas Virtuosi.

PETER QUANTRILL