Nuts about Music in Brazil

Thanks to the brand-new, and very amazing, Gramophone Archive site, I can link to the full-text of the January 2007 article "Nuts about Music in Brazil", by Phillip Clark. With John Neschling unexpectedly gone, it's sad to read about the "swift rise of an orchestra poised to join the A-list."

Neschling is interesting, and insightful, when it comes to Villa-Lobos:

"He was a giant personality who gained tremendous power.... People have often mistaken his innovative orchestration for bad orchestration. It's like cutting thick hair; you really have to get inside to find where all the strands lead. Sometimes it's necessary to rethink his dynamics, but the soundworld is really like no other."

The Gramophone Archive really is something. Naturally, my first impulse was to search for "Villa-Lobos". The result was 1058 hits, which isn't that many when you consider that each review from 1920 to the present is included in this great resource. It's actually really close to one mention per issue: the archive opened with 1023 issues!

Did I mention it was free? Kudos to this great magazine for opening up this information to the world!