Pingue-Pongue

Though little of it reaches our shores, there's a great deal more to Brazilian music than bossa nova and 1970s-style samba funk. Within Brazil (and in Japan) the older and just-as-traditional choro, serenata and valsa (Brazilian waltz) forms that were made popular in the early 20th century by artists such as Pixinguinha and Jacob do Bandolim, and later perfected by guitarists like the great Baden Powell, have become ever more popular over the last 20 years. Choro clubs have sprung up throughout Brazil – from Choro na Praça in Rio to the Boteco São Francisco in São Paulo – and there's now the Bar Alvorada in Tokyo.

Pingue-Pongue features two of Brazil's most distinguished classical guitarists duetting across a series of choros, serenatas and valsas (some of them more than a hundred years old), and original compositions by Paulo Bellinati. The playing is masterly: effortlessly precise on the soaring, lightning-fast scales of the choro ‘Pano de Louça’; pin-point accurate on the echoing counterpoint arpeggios of Bellinati's ‘Pingue-Pongue’; and displaying a dynamic subtlety on the classic melancholic valsa ‘Abismo de Rosas’. These are first-class musicians. Azuma teaches at the Sorbonne, and she won a Prix de la Création Musicale for one of her recent classical CDs. Bellinati is a graduate of Brazil's top music academy, the Conservatório Dramático e Musical de São Paulo. Their styles are a perfect complement – with Bellinati's traditional seresta steel-strung Brazilian guitar joyfully offsetting Azuma's lyrical Paulino Bernabé classical. And what adds the icing on the cake is that they’re clearly having a lot of fun.