Latin piano played with cool clarity

Villa-Lobos, Ciclo Brasileiro; Juan Jose Castro, Tangos para Piano; Jose Maria Vitier, Festiva

Back in 1993 I was involved in a CD recording project with Brazilian pianist Ricardo Peres. We recorded Dance of the White Indian* as a fund-raising project for Red Deer Public Library, where I was the Director. I remember sitting down with Ricardo one morning, and he played me this piece, which I had never heard before; I barely knew a thing about Villa-Lobos.



That was the beginning of my Villa-Lobos life on the web, 25 years of it, and counting.

In the last quarter century I've learned a great deal about this music; it's been a time of increasing interest in Villa-Lobos and a major rise in his reputation. His piano music as much as any other segment of his vast output has been the beneficiary of this. Now comes a really excellent new disc from Canadian pianist Andree-Ann Deschenes which contains The Dance of the White Indian and the rest of the Ciclo Brasileiro, one of Villa's greatest works for piano. Here's a live performance of the piece:



You'll note that this performance (which matches the recording on the CD fairly closely) is a much more controlled one than Ricardo's hell-bent for leather version. We'll always have performances on the whole continuum between Villa's warmer, more passionate, more Brazilian/folkloric side and his cooler, more cerebral, more Parisian/modernist one. The Ciclo Brasileiro is a kind of Brazilian travelogue (Villa enjoyed these), written in 1930s, when he was busy writing his Bachianas Brasileiras and the folklore-inspired Guia Pratico. I feel, perhaps counter-intuitively, that Deschenes' cool clarity puts across the regional Brazilian folkloric flavour better than some versions that swing (or even rock) a bit more. In any case, this is very fine piano playing.

The tango, of course, has its own built in hot/cool dynamic, which the Argentine composer Juan Jose Castro, a younger contemporary of Villa-Lobos, uses to excellent effect in his Tangos para Piano, written in 1941. With references to popular songs - La Cumparsita in the first tango Evocación, for example, and 9 de Julio in the last, Nostálgico - Castro brings the rhythms of the dance halls to Argentina's art music, which Villa-Lobos had been doing for some time in Brazil. I admire Deschenes' evocative playing here even more than in the Villa-Lobos, especially the bandoneón-sounding chords at the end of the last tango.

I love the idea of an encore on a CD; they should be as common on disc as in concert. Deschenes plays a fun piece by the Cuban composer Jose Maria Vitier, with able support from percussionist Calixto Oviedo. A fine end to an excellent disc.

* note that the links at this site are long dead!

This review was also posted at Music for Several Instruments.

Tuneful, easy music for guitar and orchestra

Radames Gnattali: Concertinos for Guitar and Orchestra

Radames Gnattali (1906-1988) is such an interesting composer. Nearly 20 years younger than Villa-Lobos, his career in music has much in common with his older compatriot. Both were interested in music at a very early age; both played guitar in popular music ensembles and in silent movie houses; and a melding of popular and classical music became a keynote of their music. However, it's not Villa-Lobos but George Gershwin who Gnattali most reminds me of. Gershwin was only seven years older than the Brazilian, though Gnattali lived a full fifty years longer than the unfortunate George. American jazz was the third x in Gnattali's y along with erudite and Brazilian popular music, while Villa-Lobos had no time for that particular brand of music. These light and tuneful Concertinos for guitar and orchestra include samba and choros rhythms and bits of popular songs, but as the fine liner notes by Emiliano Giannetti explain, this music

... reveals the impact of jazz in the way it includes pentatonic scales, a particular layering of sound, and marked alternation of orchestra and soloist in the form of short, serried passages in dialogue. 

The balance between solo instrument and orchestra is always problematic when it comes to the guitar. Villa-Lobos thinned out his usually full-bodied orchestra for his concerto, which ended up as the Concerto for Guitar and Small Orchestra.  Even then guitarists struggle to be heard; there's an oft-told story about Segovia's wife urging Villa-Lobos on the podium during rehearsals to quieten down the players. Gnattali also scores transparently and keeps things tuneful and easy. Concertino is the right designation for this kind of music.  Of course it's easier to deal with balance issues in the recording studio, and the sound engineers have found the perfect place for Marco Salcito's guitar with respect to the orchestra.

It's remarkable that these works aren't better known; this disc includes a premiere on CD (#1) and a world recording premiere (#2). Salcito acquits himself well, and with the strong support of conductor Marcello Bufalini and the Sinfonica Abruzzese provides us with a convincing Exhibit A in deciding whether Gnattali's four works deserve a place with the other masterworks for guitar and orchestra in the classic Spanish style, by Villa-Lobos, Ponce, Rodrigo and Castelnuevo-Tedesco. I'll need to ponder this question for a while!

This disc is due to be released on July 21, 2017. This review has also been posted at Music for Several Instruments.

An appealing mix of Brazilian piano music

Grace Alves: Keys to Rio

Along with relatively popular pieces by Ernesto Nazareth and Heitor Villa-Lobos, Brazilian pianist Grace Alves has done a real service in providing some rarities for piano from Marlos Nobre, Oriano de Almeida and especially Chiquinha Gonzaga, a great composer and social activist from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While the Gonzaga pieces Gaúcho, Suspiro and Atraente might seem slight, they have real dignity and are very much pioneering efforts in the development of Brazilian popular music.  Oriano de Almeida is from two generations after Villa-Lobos, but his music has the same Paris/Rio, modernism/folklore dynamic as Villa, though his style relies more on American jazz. This appealing music sounds more like Gershwin than his compatriot Villa-Lobos. His Valsa de Paris is really delightful. Marlos Nobre, Brazil's most distinguished living composer, provides two serious but accessible pieces that evoke the life and folklore of the North-East part of Brazil, as Villa-Lobos has often done. Alves plays with grace and power throughout, though without the final level of virtuosity and rhythmic control of Sonia Rubinsky or Nelson Freire. This is a fine first effort; I look forward to future recordings.

This review has also been posted at Music for Several Instruments.

Guitar Concerto from New Zealand

Here's a very fine performance of the Concerto for guitar and small orchestra, 1951. Matthew Marshall plays the guitar, and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra is conducted by Sir William Southgate. Wellington Town Hall, 1993.

Masterpieces revealed

Villa-Lobos Symphonies 8, 9 & 11

Villa-Lobos wrote twelve symphonies, though only eleven of the scores survive, and he wrote them from early in his career (1916) to very late (1957, two years before his death). People have been warning us for a long time not to value Villa-Lobos's symphonies too highly. I know this; I've been one of them. Don't expect too much, was the message, his best works are for the guitar and piano, and in the Choros and the Bachianas Brasileiras series. Now that we're well into the Naxos Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra (OSESP) series, led by Isaac Karabtchevsky, I'm beginning to think this particular piece of conventional wisdom might be wrong. These three symphonies sound familiar, sure, because they sound like Villa-Lobos. But even though I've heard all three a number of times, in the very good CPO series from Carl St. Clair and the Radio Symphony Orchestra of Stuttgart made around the turn of the last century, the music on the new disc sounds fresh and new and really quite amazing.  This series is forcing all of us to sit up and take notice of a whole big chunk of Villa-Lobos's legendarily large output.

In his really excellent liner notes the guitarist and musicologist Fabio Zanon talks about how Villa's mature symphonies suffered because they were different from people's expectations and because of editorial problems with the scores. Though I hear the odd echo of the Choros from Villa's heyday in Paris in the 1920s, and plenty of call-outs to the Bachianas Brasileiras series of the 1930s and early 40s, the 8th, 9th and 11th Symphonies share something of a reboot feeling for the composer.  Here he finally turns his back, more or less, on modernism, while doing the same, more or less, with the folkloric music that made his worldwide reputation. There's a neo-classical (not neo-baroque) sound that goes along with early classical symphonic structures. Zanon sees and hears both Haydn and Mozart in this music, with Beethoven and Schubert lurking around the edges. Having stripped down his orchestral music to the essentials, we're now more aware than ever of how Villa-Lobos has constructed the music. To be sure this is still music written for large orchestras, but there's no Brazilian percussion component, no prepared pianos or violinophones, and no over-the-top Romantic gestures. The first movement of the 9th Symphony is instructive. Villa zips out three themes in quick succession, gives them a quick run-through in his contrapuntal-light machine, and then, when you expect a fair bit of noodling, he winds things up abruptly, with a typical Villa-Lobos flourish. All done in less than four and a half minutes. I must say that I like the concise Villa-Lobos; it makes a nice change from the often over-blown padding of more than a few of his works. This is vivid, direct, lively music without empty gesticulation. With the varnish of score errors and outdated preconceptions removed, these three symphonies emerge as masterpieces.

A copy of this review is at Music for Several Instruments. The disc drops on June 9, 2017.

A new Villa-Lobos disc for Saxophone & orchestra

Pop on over to Music for Several Instruments for a review of saxophonist Asya Fateyeva's new Bach and Villa-Lobos disc Bachiana.

A letter to Paris

Henry Prunières in 1935

Henry Prunières is an important figure in the arts in Paris between the wars. He created La Revue musicale in 1920, running it until 1939. This periodical documented Villa-Lobos's exploits in Paris in the 1920s. Here is a letter Villa-Lobos wrote to Prunières in 1929, from the French National Library's Gallica portal.

Villa-Lobos Harp Concerto from Russia

I noticed the remastered disc of Vera Dulova's 1976 Melodiya recording of the Villa-Lobos Harp Concerto up on the Naxos Music Library today. Here's the original LP:

The Harp Concerto should be much better known than it is. It was written in 1953 on commission from harpist Nicanor Zabaleta.

This is the same disc in a 2015 remastering:

A late interview with Villa-Lobos

This is a really interesting interview that Villa-Lobos gave at the Empire State Music Festival in Harriman State Park (Bear Mountain) in New York, on July 12, 1959. This was the composer's last concert before his death. Though he couldn't have been in the best of health, he sounds his usual self. His wife Mindinha chimes in at the end.

Unfortunately my Portuguese is less than basic, but this Google translation of the YouTube poster's summary give the gist of what Villa said:

Villa-Lobos comments on the issues of the time, welcomes the Brazilian people, declares his love for the homeland - Rio de Janeiro - and talks to the journalist while the orchestra rehearses the presentation of more. In the audio that is now part of the MEC FM radio collection, Villa-Lobos demystifies the creation process. "This business of coming inspiration does not exist in me. I was born inspired already. Either I do a good thing, or I do crap. But this business of me looking for inspiration, letting hair grow to have inspiration, drink, it does not exist in me. I write when I need to. 

Miloš plays Villa-Lobos Prelude No. 1

Miloš Karadaglić plays a spectacular Prelude as an encore, in this preview from Medici.TV.

Uirapuru danced in Madrid

The Argentine choreographer Dani Pannullo and his dance company present Uirapuru, based on Villa-Lobos' great early orchestral masterpiece. The music is played by JORCAM, conducted by Jordi Frances-Sanjuan. This is from 2011.

Merry Christmas from The Villa-Lobos Magazine

Here's a Christmas staple for the Villa-Lobos lover: the beautiful Praesepe, a choral work written in 1952 for alto soloist and mixed chorus, #21 in the collection Musica Sacra, vol. 1.

Villa-Lobos set the words of Padre Jose de Anchieta, a Portuguese missionary to Brazil, written in 1563.

Text and translation are from the liner notes to the Corydon Singers/Matthew Best Villa Lobos sacred music CD on the Hyperion label (CDA6638, 1992/93.) Used with permission of Hyperion Records.

Messiaen on Villa-Lobos

In this short audio clip from the Centre de Recherche en Ethnomusicologie, Olivier Messiaen talks about the influence of Villa-Lobos on his own music.

The great beasts of Villa-Lobos

In his liner essay for the third volume of The Guitar Manuscripts on Naxos, guitarist Andrea Bissoli quotes from the memoirs of the Spanish pianist Tomás Terán:

That year [1928] we spent the summer together in Lussac-les-Châteaux. We found a place to stay above a kind of pâtisserie that only opened on high days and holidays. Our rooms looked out over the garden at the back and were divided by a wooden panel that was so insubstantial we could chat to one another through the wall till the early hours. Villa planned to amuse himself by constructing a fleet of kites, so we’d arrived laden down with enormous lengths of bamboo, rope and sheets of paper: the lady who owned the shop below thought we must have been members of a circus ... The day he flew the first kite (designed in the shape of a huge fish), it was caught by a sudden gust of wind just as he was launching it, and went up like a rocket; it dragged Villa along for several metres before I managed to cut its ropes. The kite came down three or four kilometres away: after that experience his “great beasts” frightened me. I suggested to him that in future he should tie them to a tree, for safety’s sake, and he agreed. Those kites were great fun for the people of Lussac. Some days, Villa would play the guitar late into the night (I should point out we were the only people staying at the pâtisserie); that was when he had the idea of composing his studies for the instrument.

This is how Villa-Lobos came to write one of his most important creations: the 12 Etudes for guitar.



Naxos has just released a box set of the three volumes of The Guitar Manuscripts. I'll be writing a review Real Soon Now. In the meantime, here's a picture (from the Museu Villa-Lobos) of Villa-Lobos and Terán with one of Villa's Great Beasts; and via Spotify, the  “symphonic episode” O papagaio do moleque (The little boy’s kite), from the same disc. It's played by the Minas Gerais Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Fabio Mechetti.

I think that's Villa on the left, Terán in the middle, and I assume Lucilla on the right. [nope: see Comments]

Festival Música Nova 'Gilberto Mendes'

The 50th annual Festival Música Nova 'Gilberto Mendes' takes place in Ribeirão Preto during November 2016. This year's festival is in memory of Mendes, who died January 1, 2016, and Pierre Boulez, who died four days later.

There's more information on the Festival concerts here. And here's the superb OSESP Choir conducted by Naomi Munakata, singing one of Mendes' great avant garde works, Beba Coca-Cola. This clip is from the documentary film A Odisseia Musical de Gilberto Mendes, directed by Carlos de Moura Ribeiro Mendes.

RIP Roland Dyens

It was a sad day last Saturday when I heard of the death at the age of 61 of the great Tunisien/French guitarist and composer Roland Dyens. The main Villa-Lobos/Dyens connection is one of the best known of his compositions: Hommage à Villa-Lobos. Here it is, played by Elena Papandreou (tracks 6-9).



There are a few Villa-Lobos pieces included amongst Dyens' large discography. I haven't heard this 1987 Valois CD; unfortunately it seems to be quite rare and expensive. Besides the Villa-Lobos Concerto it includes Dyens' own Hommage recording as well as the Choros no. 1 and the Suite populaire bresilienne. And I've never seen even a cover picture of the 1990 Arc en Ciel CD that includes the 5 Preludes.

Old favourites at Christmas

[This is embarrassing: I posted this review here at the Villa-Lobos Magazine instead of at my review site, Music for Several Instruments. Rather than breaking links on Twitter, I'll leave this here though. By the way, you should definitely buy this disc!]

If there's one classical CD I've listened to more than any other in the past decade, it's this one with Les Violons du Roy under their founder, Bernard Labadie. Or rather, it's the original of this new reissue by ATMA Classique, first released by Dorian Sono Luminus in 1993. The reissue is due out on November 4, 2016. In some ways it's easier to review a brand new disc I've never heard before than a cherished one that has its MP3 files worn down by constant listening. It's hard to be objective about something I know so well. Perhaps a new version, even by the same group, might be more stylish. After all, the art and science of Historically Information Performance moves ahead every year. But surely there's something to be said, especially at Christmas time, for dearly loved tradition. This is simply the best selection of Baroque pastoral music, which goes best with snow falling on Christmas Eve.

This tweet is six years old!

My favourite Xmas CD this year: Les Violons du Roy, Christmas Symphonies, Lalande, Pezel, +more @Sono__Luminus - listening @NaxosMusicLib

— Dean Villa-Frey (@villa_lobos) December 18, 2010

Hommage à Heitor Villa-Lobos

Here is a concert, from August 30, 1954, with the Orchestre National de la Radio-Television Francaise conducted by Villa-Lobos. The first work is Dawn in a Tropical Rain Forest (Alvorada Na Floresta Tropical). You can listen to the first bit for free, but it will cost 4 Euros to download the whole concert. That includes a second half, featuring Magda Tagliaferro playing the piano, I believe in Bachianas Brasileiras no. 3, though it might be Momoprecoce. Enjoy!

Uirapuru in Buenos Aires

Villa-Lobos wrote his great orchestral work Uirapuru in 1917*, and it was adapted by Serge Lifar as a ballet in 1935. The premiere of the ballet was at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires on May 25, 1935, on the occasion of a state visit by President Vargas. The picture above, from the Museu Villa-Lobos, is from the new 1940 version of the ballet, choreographed by Vaslav Veltchek.

* Or did he? Villa often revised his early works, and in the case of the Sexteto mistico, lost the score and re-composed it from memory many years later. If the Uirapuru score indeed comes from 1917, it's Villa's earliest orchestral masterpiece, but Mario de Andrade believed it was substantially re-written for the 1935 performance.

Here is an excellent version of Uirapuru: the Orquesta Sinfonica de RTVE is conducted by Carlos Kalmar.

Digression

There are many stories of Villa-Lobos's multi-tasking, and his phenomenal ability to focus on his music in spite of many distractions. Here's a typical one, from the Presenca Villa-Lobos no. 10, in the Museu Villa-Lobos. The translation is by Harold Lewis.

In the text of a radio talk given in August 1975, Walter Burle Marx recalled that Villa-Lobos had offered to produce a piece for one of the young persons' concerts he (Burle Marx) was organising.  Two days before the concert, in November 1932, he visited Villa-Lobos in his little apartment in the centre of Rio.  The composer had just finished dinner and was clearing the table.

"I'll work on it tonight, and should finish it at 4 a.m."
 "Villa-Lobos," he inquired, "how far have you got with the work you've promised?"    "I'll work on it tonight, and should finish it at 4 a.m."
"And the parts?"
"I'll do them myself and some friends are coming to help me later."
"Then I'll let you get on with it and not disturb you." 

"You're not disturbing me at all," said Villa-Lobos, insisting that Burle Marx stayed.

After sorting the manuscripts on the table, Villa-Lobos went on working on the orchestration while talking to his visitor.  At the same time, in another room of the apartment, the pianist Jose Brandão was playing the transcription of the symphonic poem 'Amazonas', and from time to time, Villa-Lobos, hearing something that wasn't right, called out to Brandao, "No, no, it's G flat in the bass," and so forth. The fact was that next day at 9 a.m., the young musicians received the score of the Caixinha de Boas Festas, with all the parts written out.

Here's another: Lisa Peppercorn reminisces about her visit with Villa-Lobos while he and John Sebastian worked on the Harmonica Concerto.

It was one of my joys to work with John and Villa-Lobos during the writing of the Concerto. The composer sat at the huge semi-circular desk with a pot of black thick coffee, several cigars and ashtrays all around working on several compositions at once, while watching a TV at intervals. All the time wearing a hat...

These are examples of Digression or Divigation (Divagação in Portuguese), and I expect this is a common enough trait of great artists. The big, the very big, picture emerges in the mind of the genius, and he or she pokes around it, taking different paths, sometimes at once, to bring it to the rest of us. In the words of Italo Calvino, "Divagation or digression is a way to postpone the ending," and it's in story-telling that we see it most often. According to Lawrence Sterne, "Digression is the sunshine of narrative".  It reminds me of the tall tales Villa told during his first trip to Paris, most notably the one about the man-eating plant in the Brazilian jungle that swallowed a companion whole, but that spit him out unharmed when Villa played a tune on a flute. And this in answer to the banal question "where do you get your ideas?" The music itself is often full of musical digressions, with development sloughed off in favour of another theme, or two or three. Symphonies become suites, and suites are hidden as "Choros" with touches of samba or other urban serenades. In a way these stories and his huge body of work (which he turned into another tall tale, since it's nowhere near as large as he made out) are digressions, to postpone the ending.

Paul Holdengraber from the New York Public Library has been talking for a while about Digression. He quotes the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips: “Digression is secular revelation,” and explains more fully:

When we talk about digression, we’re talking about getting lost, about taking the side roads, or the road just behind the road we thought we were taking. What doesn’t quite fit, what might be dismissed, but isn’t, becomes the road to revelation.

Just a personal aside (ha!), my whole Villa-Lobos life on the web, which is coming up to 25 years pretty soon, is a series of hyper-text digressions to reveal some of the facets of the amazing person who was Heitor Villa-Lobos.

All this complex narrative, and I finally get around to what I wanted to post today, which is this very good performance of Villa's little piece for cello and piano which he wrote in 1946, entitled Divagação. Notice how the composer (a professional cellist himself) digresses with some ad libitum cello-drumming before he begins the actual cello part!


Thanks to @Holdengraber for his amazing Twitter feed, and for the great work he's doing at NYPL.