For fans of Schoenberg's piano music, here's a sampler of how serialism developed in Brazil, particularly in the piano music of Claudio Santoro. Santoro was part of the Música Viva movement of the 1940s, which favored serialism over nationalism in Brazil's new music. Most of the works are very brief, but the Sonatas are more substantial both in size and feeling. Throughout his works there is a fascination with the percussive nature of the piano, which makes for compelling moments in the Sonata No. 3. There is also a fascination with the contrast between loud and soft, which Gilda Oswaldo Cruz brings out so clearly and sympathetically. Santoro's earlier pieces on this disc -- the Peças (4) e Pequena Toccata, Peças (6), and Sonata No. 1 -- are representative of the Música Viva school: atonal and serial, with a formality that seems to restrict expression to sharp and frequent contrasts between the thorny and the smooth, the intense and the calm. After meeting colleagues in Russia and Europe who decried twelve-tone music, Santoro put more elements of Brazilian folk music and emotional expression into his rhythms and themes, but remained atonal. The works representing this period include the Sonata No. 3 and the Prelúdios (12). The lyrical, evocative preludes are obviously modeled after Chopin's Preludes, Op. 28. Santoro's final period is represented by the Balada, a fusion of the serialism of the early works and the expression of the middle works. Here the contrasts of articulation and sentiment are allowed more time to develop. Cruz has an acute sense of those contrasts and can bring out the communicative qualities of the works. She makes it easier for the listener to connect emotionally with a type of music that many view as impersonal and academic.