Two Villa-Lobos Discs Nominated for Latin Grammy Awards

Two Villa-Lobos discs have been nominated for Latin Grammy awards.  The excellent Delos CD from the Brazilian Guitar Quartet [pictured above] includes a wide variety of piano and chamber works arranged for four guitars by group member Tadeu do Amaral. You can listen to Track 14 from the disc at Soundcloud: it's one of Villa-Lobos's Cirandas, A procura de uma agulha (Hunting for a Needle).

The other disc is from the young Austrian ensemble the Villa-Lobos Trio: pianist Rosângela Antunes, violinist Florian Wilscher, and cellist Katrin Schickedanz. This fine Oehms Classics CD includes Villa-Lobos's early (1911) First Piano Trio, along with an arrangement by J. Bragato of Piazzolla's Las Cuatros Estaciones Portenas, and an interesting work by Lucio Bruno-Videla called Yumba Verwandlung. You can listen to the first movement of the Villa-Lobos Piano Trio at the VLT website.

Good luck to both groups!

Latin Grammy nod for Sonia Rubinsky

The Latin Grammy nominations were announced in Los Angeles this morning. Congratulations to Sonia Rubinsky and the great people at Naxos for a well-deserved nomination. There are two classical categories:

• Best Album, which includes Rubinsky's disc; and
  
• Best Classical Contemporary Composition, which this year includes Orlando Jacinto Garcia, Clarice Assad, Gabriela Lena Frank, Roberto Sierra, and Alfonso Fuentes
  

Rubinsky's disc, the 8th and final one in her monumental series of Villa-Lobos's Piano Music, is worthy of an award not only for the series, but on its own. It includes some very important but under-played works. Rubinsky's recordings have helped to bring this music to a much wider audience; and hopefully to a new generation of pianists. She has helped to raise Villa's reputation as a composer, in the same way that people like Carl St. Clair, the Cuarteto Latinoamericano, Roberto Minczuk, and John Neschling have done in the past ten years.