Isaías Sávio
photo: proferafa2 · cc by-sa 3.0 ↗Isaías Sávio was a Uruguayan-born classical guitarist who settled in São Paulo in 1931 and spent the next four decades as Brazil's leading classical guitar pedagogue, holding the classical guitar chair at the city's Dramatic and Musical Conservatory. His own compositions and arrangements, gathered into collections like 'Cenas Brasileiras,' fused Brazilian folk melody with formal classical guitar technique, and his students — among them Luiz Bonfá — carried that discipline into Brazilian popular music.
As a young player in Montevideo and Buenos Aires, Sávio 'discovered Agustín Barrios and Miguel Llobet,' the two towering South American concert guitarists of the era, and biographers credit them with shaping his own playing before he settled in Brazil and turned to teaching. Barrios's model — a touring virtuoso-composer writing idiomatic, folk-rooted concert works for solo guitar rather than just transcribing European repertoire — is the same template Sávio followed in his own 'Cenas Brasileiras' collections.
listen forPlay Barrios's 'La Catedral,' with its three contrasting movements built entirely for solo guitar, then Sávio's 'Serões.' Listen for the shared ambition: a folk or devotional mood turned into a fully worked-out classical guitar composition, not just a strummed accompaniment.
Alongside Barrios, Sávio named Miguel Llobet — the Barcelona guitarist and Tárrega student famous for elevating Catalan folk song into concert repertoire — as an early, formative discovery. Llobet's approach to folk melody, dressing a simple traditional tune in careful classical-guitar harmony and voicing rather than a plain strum, is the same move Sávio makes repeatedly across his 'Cenas Brasileiras' pieces.
listen forPlay Llobet's arrangement of the Catalan folk song 'El Testament d'Amelia,' then Sávio's 'Palmeiras do Brasil.' Listen for the same gesture: a folk melody everyone already knows, reharmonized and voiced for concert guitar rather than left as a simple tune.