Feisty and Wiry Music by Fernando Lopes-Graça - heard by GERALD FENECH 'Performances are wholly committed ...'

Fernando Lopes-Graça (1906-1994), one of Portugal's most enigmatic twentieth century composers, began his musical studies in his home town of Tomar, completing them at the Lisbon National Conservatoire in 1931. Between 1932 and 1936 he taught at the Coimbra Musical Academy, but his career was curtailed because of the dictatorships that arose during those years. Lopes-Graça, who was an open dissident, soon felt the hammer blows of Salazar's regime, and in a short space of time he was arrested twice, his works were banned and, to cap it all, he was stripped of his official positions. To all this repression the composer responded in music, evolving a feisty and wiry Bartókian language enmeshed within the frame of Portuguese folk-music...

PORTUGAL

20TH CENTURY

CHAMBER MUSIC

PIANO MUSIC

STRING MUSIC

TOCCATA CLASSICS