Francisco de Sá Noronha: The Five Fantasias for Violin and Orchestra

The violinist and composer Francisco de Sá Noronha (1820–81) divided his career between the Old World, performing in his native Portugal and in England, and the New, with concerts in the United States and Brazil. Just as Liszt used the piano to make the music of his own time available to a wider public, so, too, do three of Noronha’s five surviving fantasias for violin and orchestra, using melodies from operas that were then only a few years old. His two original fantasias were written in the same spirit, alternating lyrical cantabile writing and brilliant virtuosity, justifying Noronha’s reputation as ‘the Portuguese Paganini’. The full scores of four of these works are lost, and so the piano versions have been orchestrated for this recording project by the Portuguese composer and musical polymath César Viana.

Eliot Lawson, violin
Luis Pacheco Cunha, violin
Orquestra do Norte
Fernando Marinho, conductor