“Villa-Lobos was not an isolated case,” said the Brazilian Consul General at the launch of Naxos’s ambitious 30-disc Brazilian music project. It is fitting, then, that this first disc should showcase Alberto Nepomuceno (1864-1920) who counted Villa-Lobos among his students, championing his career, and was one of the first to employ Brazilian folk elements in his music.

This polished recording by the Minas Gerais Philharmonic Orchestra under Fabio Mechetti opens with the cheery fanfare of Nepomuceno’s Prelude to a...