Oscar Lorenzo Fernandez was a key figure in the cultural life of Rio de Janeiro. The primordial power of Batuque, the final movement of his Afro-Brazilian influenced suite Reisado do Pastoreio, gained the composer international fame. Without ever abandoning his Brazilian roots, in his later career Lorenzo Fernandez moved away from explicit nationalism towards a more universalist idiom as can be heard in the vigorously themed and atmospheric First Symphony of 1945 and the programmatic Second Symphony, inspired by the life and death of the heroic 17th-century explorer Fernao Dias Paes Leme. Symphony No. 1 is a world premiere recording.
