A Musical Mandala

Violinist Gil Morgenstern presents a fascinating concert in his Reflections series: "A Musical Mandala: From Bach to Barkauskas and Back", on October 18th at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City. This is a typical high-concept presentation for Morgenstern, who is accompanied by pianist Donald Berman, and one that I would dearly love to attend:

The mandala is used in many religious traditions as an artistic aid for meditation to advance practitioners toward a state of enlightenment. A Musical Mandala takes the music of Johann Sebastian Bach as its starting point and circles through works by Schumann, Ysaye, Bartok, Barkauskas, Villa-Lobos, and Kreisler. Join us as we meditate on Bach's enormous influence on enlightened composers and audiences over a period of more than 300 years.

The Reflections series then goes on the road, to the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach on November 18, to North Carolina and Pennsylvania, and to Florence, Capri, and Rome, Italy.

Maybe I'll catch the concert in Capri.

Villalobiana in Mexico City

The Escuela Nacional de Musica at UNAM in Mexico City will be marking "el cincuentenario luctuoso" ("mournful anniversary") of the death of Villa-Lobos on November 17 & 19th of this year. This call for participation goes out to those connected with the school. This promises to be a significant Villa-Lobos event.

Villa-Lobos on Cultura FM: September 2009

Here are Villa-Lobos performances upcoming on Cultura FM from Sao Paulo. Listen here on the Internet. Times are local Sao Paulo times, one hour ahead of EST. Recommended: the Sunday series "O Brasil de Villa-Lobos" with Museu Villa-Lobos Director Turíbio Santos.

September 1:
07:00 DESPERTE COM OS CLÁSSICOS:
HAYDN - Allegro moderato do concerto em ré maior, op.101. Jacqueline Durpé (violoncelo). Orquestra Sinfônica de Londres. Reg.: Daniel Baremboim. / Johann Christian BACH - Sinfonia, op. 3 n° 5 em fá maior. Orquestra do Festival de Londres. Reg.: Ross Pople. / BRAHMS - Allegro Appassionato da sonata em fá menor, op. 120 n°1. Richard Stoltzman (clarineta). Richard Goode (piano). / VILLA-LOBOS -Bachianas Brasileiras n° 5. Maria Bayo (soprano). Orquestra Nacional de Lyon. Reg.: Emmanuel Krivine.

September 4:
23:00 NOTURNO:
VILLA-LOBOS - Plantio do caboclo. Lydia Kennedy e Frans Van Gurp (violões). John TAVENER - Aleluia. Coro Sinfônico de São Francisco. Reg.: Vance George.

September 6:
11:00 O BRASIL DE VILLA-LOBOS - por Turíbio Santos - Edição Especial:
Prelúdios para Violão Goran Sollscher (violão) / Suíte para orquestra de câmara nº 2. Orquestra da Universidade de São Paulo. Reg. Carlos Moreno
Fantasia para saxofone Theodore Kerkezoz (saxofone)

September 9:
13:00 DELICATESSEN com Teresa Lima:
Joseph HAYDN - Sinfonia Hob. I: 72. Sinfônica Bamberger. Reg.: Jonathan Nott. / Osvaldo LACERDA - Poemeto / Cantilena / Toccatina. Antonio Carlos Carrasqueira (flauta). Maria José Carrasqueira (piano). / VILLA-LOBOS - Pequena Suíte. Zygmunt St. Kubala (violoncelo). Rosana Civile (piano).

September 12:
10:00 CIRANDA - Academia Brasileira de Música:
José Alberto KAPLAN - Variantes para flauta, violão e orquestra. Regina Lima Machado (flauta). Eugênio Lima de Souza (violão). Orquestra da Universidade Federal da Paraíba. Reg.: Carlos Anísio. / Radamés GNATTALI - Trio para bandolim e dois violões / Joel Nascimento (bandolim), Luiz Otávio Braga e Bartolomeu Wiese (violões). Clovis PEREIRA - Três peças nordestinas. Quinteto da Paraíba. / VILLA-LOBOS - A prole do bebê nº 1. Nelson Freire (piano).

September 13:
11:00 O BRASIL DE VILLA-LOBOS - por Turíbio Santos - Edição Especial Quartour para flauta, oboé clarineta e fagote.Joachim Schmitz (flauta), Petra Fhuhr (oboé), Johannes Moog (clarineta), Urich Freund (fagote). Sonata fantasia n° 2 para violino e piano - Nngagul Tumaugelov (violino) Bojidor Noer (piano). Lenda do caboclo, e Alma brasileira. Sergio e Odair Assad (Violão). Ciranda das sete notas.Orquestra New Music Stagium. Reg. Antonio Plotino. Sino Vernizzi (fagote).

20:00 MUSICA CONTEMPORANEA - Concertos CPFL ao vivo. Apresentação: João Marcos Coelho.
O grupo Sonax constrói seus próprios instrumentos, e seus integrantes criaram coletivamente a suíte "Villa-Lobos Landscape", tendo como convidado o violeiro Paulo Freire.

September 14:
13:00 DELICATESSEN com Teresa Lima:
Ernesto NAZARETH - Confidências - Valsa. Izumi Tateno (piano). / Peter Joseph von LINDPAINTNER - Concerto em fá maior Op. 44. Albrecht Holder (fagote). Orquestra Filarmônica de Stuttgart. Reg.: Nicolas Pasquet. / VILLA-LOBOS - Segunda sonata para violoncelo e piano Op. 66. Tânia Lisboa (violoncelo). Miriam Braga (piano). Yang Zhang (violino).

23:00 NOTURNO:
Ferrucio BUSONI - Peças características para clarinete e piano. Dieter Klöcker (clarinete). Werner Genuit (piano). / VILLA-LOBOS - Estudos. Sérgio e Odair Assad (violão).

September 16:
07:00 DESPERTE COM OS CLÁSSICOS:
MOZART - Andante com cinco variações em sol maior, K. 501. Jeno Jandó e Zsuzsa Kollár (piano a quatro mãos)./ MILHAUD - Saudades do Brasil. Orquestra Nacional da França. Dir. Leonard Bernstein./ VILLA-LOBOS - Prelúdio das "Bachianas Brasileiras" nº 4. Orquestra de Câmara "Solistas de Londrina"./ GERSHWIN - Rhapsody in Blue. Leornard Bernstein (piano e regência). Orq. Filarmônica de Los Angeles.

September 20:
11:00 O BRASIL DE VILLA-LOBOS - por Turíbio Santos - Edição Especial: Sinfonia nº 1 e nº 6 de Villa-lobos Orquestra Sinfônica da Rádio de Stuttgart Carl St. Clair.

20:00 MUSICA CONTEMPORANEA - Concertos CPFL ao vivo. Apresentação: João Marcos Coelho:
"De Bach à Floresta Amazônica", de junho passado. Edna d'Oliveira (soprano) interpreta canções de Villa-Lobos acompanhada pelo notável violonista Sidney Molina.

September 22 (repeated September 23, 1:00)
14:00 PIANÍSSIMO - Apresentação do pianista e professor Gilberto Tinetti:
VILLA-LOBOS: CONCERTOS - CRISTINA ORTIZ

September 27:
11:00 O BRASIL DE VILLA-LOBOS - por Turíbio Santos - Edição Especial: Rudepoema . Nelson Freire (Piano). Prelúdio n° 2 para piano e violoncelo - Antonio Menezes (violoncelo), Cristina Ortiz (piano).

September 28:
13:00 DELICATESSEN com Teresa Lima:
CHOPIN - Balada n° 1 em sol menor Op. 23. Murray Perahia (piano). / Josef SUK - Fantastické Scherzo Op. 25. Orquestra Filarmônica Tcheca. Reg.: Jirí Belohlávek. / VILLA-LOBOS - Trio n° 1 em dó menor. Tânia Lisboa (violoncelo). Miriam Braga (piano). Yang Zhang (violino).

September 30:
20:00 O VIOLÃO NA ERA DO DISCO: Juliam Bream - com Sidney Molina :
Gravações dos álbuns, "Julian Bream Plays Villa-Lobos" (1971), "Together" (1971), "The Woods so Wild" (1972) e "Julian Bream 70s" (1973).

Brubeck & Martins at Lincoln Center

Here's some exciting news: jazz legend Dave Brubeck & Brazilian conductor and pianist João Carlos Martins will be performing at New York's Lincoln Center this October. Martins, a former piano virtuoso who now conducts the Bachiana Filarmônica, will bring his orchestra with him from Brazil to Avery Fisher Hall. He'll conduct Bachianas Brasilieras #7, and he and Dave Brubeck will perform Bach together.

“The rapport between João Carlos and me was instant. And ever since that time we shared many a musical thought which is what the October 2nd concert is all about." - Dave Brubeck

Watch this excellent YouTube video to learn more about the close relationship these two great musicians have built together over the years:

Magnificat Alleluia at FIC 2009

The Festival Internacional de Corais (FIC 2009) website includes this page which includes the score, in various formats, for a choral arrangement of the 1958 Magnificat-Alleluia (originally written for mixed choir & orchestra). Here is a video (again, thanks to the FIC website) of the Orquestra Sinfônica e Coro de Câmara da Escola de Música da UFMG, directed by Vivian Assis. The soloist is Luciana Monteiro.

Villa-Lobos at MIMO 2009

The Mostra Internacional de Música em Olinda (MIMO) is an annual festival in Olinda, Pernambuco, in the North East region of Brazil. This year's festival includes a number of concerts with music by Villa-Lobos, including concerts with the Quarteto Radamés Gnattali and the Orquestra Sinfônica de Barra Mansa.

Festival Internacional de Corais

This international choral festival, which begins on September 18 in Minas Gerais, honours the legacy of Heitor Villa-Lobos. It's another major project during this Ano Villa-Lobos.

The festival has also organized two audio-visual exhibitions with the help of the Museu Villa-Lobos, one permanent, and another which goes on the road throughout Brazil beginning on Sept. 10. The FIC website has all sort of interesting information.

Here's something cool: every year (this is the 7th annual version) maestro Leonardo Cunha writes a theme song for the festival. This year's is called Mestre Villa:


The website includes PDF and MP3 versions of the music. Here are the lyrics of this piece, written by Fernando Brant.

MESTRE VILLA
(Leonardo Cunha e Fernando Brant)

a canção do povo
quem a fez foi Villa
que ouviu a alma do Brasil

mais que brasileira
é canção do mundo
foi o Mestre Villa quem criou

a cantiga, o choro, o violão
a seresta e vozes em coral
a ciranda, a dança e o lundu
floresta amazônica de sons

("olha a rosa amarela, rosa
tão bonita e tão bela, rosa
olha a rosa amarela, rosa
tão bonita e tão bela, rosa")

o Magnificat-Alleluia bate lá no coração
trenzinho atravessando o nosso interior
as Bachianas Brasileiras inventando um Brasil
que vive em nosso canto, em nossa voz.

In Google Translate's English version:

MASTER VILLA
(Leonardo Cunha & Fernando Brant)
the song of the people
who made it was Villa
who heard the soul of Brazil

more than Brazilian
the world is song
Villa was the Master who created

the song, the crying, the guitar
the singers and choral voices
the nursery rhymes, dance and lundu
rainforest sounds

( "look at the yellow rose, pink
so beautiful, so beautiful, pink
look at the yellow rose, pink
so beautiful, so beautiful, pink ")

Magnificat-Alleluia there beats the heart
interior train crossing our inner
the Bachianas Brasileiras inventing a Brazil
that lives in our corner, our voice.

Music & Dictatorship in Europe & Latin America

I look forward to reading this really interesting book; I came across this Pre-Publication Announcement at the Interesting Music Stuff blog:

Music and Dictatorship in Europe and Latin America
Edited by Roberto Illiano and Massimiliano Sala
approx. 700 p., 210 x 270 mm, HB, ISBN 978-2-503-52779-6, EUR 125
Special pre-publication price: €105 valid until 31 October 2009
Series: Speculum musicae, vol. 14
Publication date: November 2009

The most interesting article for the Villa-Lobos scholar is T. Garcia's "Music and the Brazilian Estado Novo: Getúlio Vargas, Heitor Villa-Lobos and a National Music Education System," from which the following page is taken.


As I mentioned in a post earlier this year, we need a fuller discussion of Villa-Lobos's relationship with the darker side of the Vargas regime. It looks like this book might provide more information about both the particular case in Brazil and its context in the 20th century.

It's a coincidence, by the way, that I should come across the book A música nacionalista no govêrno Getulio Vargas twice in two days. This looks like a job for InterLibrary Loan!

The Yale Glee Club, Robert Goulet, and the Brazilian National Anthem

The Yale Glee Club is 150 years old this year, and naturally there are many interesting stories to be told. This post on the Yale Glee Club blog, "From Charlton Lyons - Reviews of the 1941 Tour," tells a great one about a performance in Rio de Janeiro with a special guest:

...the world famous composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos, who was not merely in the audience that night but who, by prearrangement, came up on the stage to conduct the Yale Glee Club in its performance of its first number, the Brazilian National Anthem. And it was during our singing of their National Anthem that Villa-Lobos turned to the audience to conduct the audience as well. The Yale Glee Club did know that country’s national anthem—we knew it very, very well and could sing it a splendid version of Portuguese, but the Brazilians did not. I remember the occasion perfectly—well, almost perfectly. I have no recollection of the near silence of the audience reported by the reviewer, a silence owing to the fact that only a few could sing it. But, singing my own head off, I would not have heard that silence anyway, would I? No! Certainly not!

It's a great story from the Glee Club point of view, but it must have been a bit of an embarrassment for Villa-Lobos. That same year he published

A Música Nacionalista no Govêrno Getúlio Vargas ca. 1941, in which he characterised the nation as a sacred entity whose symbols (including its flag, motto and national anthem) were inviolable. Villa-Lobos was the chair of a committee whose task was to define a definitive version of the Brazilian national anthem.

The quote is from the Wikipedia article on Villa-Lobos, this section of which is based on Simon Wright's 1992 Villa-Lobos. When I read the Glee Club story, though, it made me think about the famous National Anthem incident starring Canadian Robert Goulet (again thanks to Wikipedia):

On May 25, 1965, Goulet mangled the lyrics to the United States National Anthem at the opening of the Muhammad Ali-Sonny Liston heavyweight championship fight in Lewiston, Maine. Goulet had never sung the anthem in public before, and replaced the lyrics "dawn's early light" and "gave proof through the night" with "dawn's early night" and "gave proof through the fight." The gaffe was reported in newspapers nationwide the next morning, and Goulet was criticized in opinion columns for a lack of knowledge of the lyrics.

The best part of the story isn't included here. I remember hearing Goulet talk about how, at a nightclub gig soon after this incident, he began to sing "O Say Can You See..." as a joke. He assumed that everyone had heard what happened, and would treat it as a joke as well. When the crowd began to sing along, though, he had no choice but to continue as well, and mangled the words once again.

I love that story. Goulet, by the way, was born to French Canadian parents in Massachussets, but spent his formative years 600 km to the north (!) of Red Deer's Villa-Lobos Central Control, in Girouxville, Alberta.

But back to the Hino Nacional Brasileiro. The Orquestra Sinfonica do Estado do Sao Paulo and their conductor John Neschling have recorded a CD of the absolutely authentic versions of the National Anthem (in orchestral and choral versions), and other national songs:

01. Hino Nacional Brasileiro - versão instrumental
02. Hino Nacional Brasileiro - versão com coro
03. Hino da Independência
04. Hino da Bandeira Nacional
05. Hino da Proclamação da República

You can download the entire album for free, thanks to the Osesp website. While you're there, check out their many freely-available podcasts.

Brazilian Music MP3s

For a limited time this sampler album of eight MP3s can be downloaded for free from Amazon.com's MP3 store. The songs are by Grupo Batuque, Sabrina Malheiros, The Ipanemas, Joyce, Clara Moreno, Azymuth, Jose Roberto Bertrami and His Modern Sound, and Marcos Valle.

There's lots more information about these musicians and this music from the website of the great Far Out Recordings company.

These downloads are only available on for Americans, unfortunately.

About the New Villa-Lobos scores

The story of the newly-discovered scores of Villa-Lobos has some legs. AP has picked the story up, and I've seen it featured in a number of Portuguese and French music blogs. Here's some new information from Marcelo Rodolfo at the Museu Villa-Lobos in Rio - thanks, Marcelo!:

The great Brazilian soprano Vera Janacopulos, in order to help Villa-Lobos, asked him to arrange/transcribe to her songs by other composers and Guy de Ropartz was one of them.

Let's hope that the current crop of Brazilian sopranos are lining up to record these new songs!

P.S. Thanks to Vera Janacopulos, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and the estagiários (interns) who discovered these scores nearly 90 years after they were written, for leading me to the amazing music of Guy Ropartz.

Who is Guy Ropartz?

And why did Villa-Lobos orchestrate his music?

I hadn't come across Joseph Guy Ropartz before - his dates are 1864-1955, so he was in the generation before Villa-Lobos. The very informative Wikipedia article provide the following information:

Born in Brittany, Ropartz studied in Paris with such important teachers as Jules Massenet and César Franck. From 1919 to 1929 he was busy in Alsace, as the Director of the Strasbourg Academy, and of the Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1929 he retired to Brittany, and died there in 1955, four years before Villa-Lobos.

This short resume of Ropartz's life shows that it was very unlikely that Villa-Lobos's connection to him was personal (as so many of his connections were - think of his close relationships with Edgard Varese, Olivier Messiaen, Florent Schmitt). The newly-discovered orchestrations were dated 1921, and Villa didn't arrive in Paris until 1923. In spite of the difference in their ages and their musical interests, though, there is a connection between these two composers. A French blog post about the newly-found scores calls Ropartz "son homologue français," Villa's French counterpart.

The Wikipedia article points to the probable reason that Villa chose this composer to adapt:
Ropartz wrote that he was the son of a country "where the goblins populate the moor and dance by the moony nights around the menhirs; where the fairies and the enchanters - Viviane and Merlin - have as a field the forest of Brocéliande; where the spirits of the unburied dead appear all white above the waters of the Bay of the Departed." This interest in the world of folklore was shared by the composer of Amazonas and Uirapuru (1917), both of which are about the same fairy-world creatures of the forest that interested Ropartz. I very recently blogged about the mythological forest being that inhabits the First String Quartet, from the same period (1915).

The Wikipedia article includes this quote about Robartz by Rene Dumesnil in Le Monde. It could have been written about Villa-Lobos as well:

"There is with Ropartz a science of folklore and its proper use, which one admires; but more often than the direct use of popular motifs it is an inspiration drawn from the same soil which nourishes the work, like sap in trees."

I'm listening to Ropartz's First Symphony "On a Breton Chorale" on a Timpani recording with the Nancy Symphony, conducted by Sebastien Lang-Lessing (on the Naxos Music Library). This music sounds as connected to the folkloric world as any of Villa's works. "I am Folklore", Villa-Lobos famously said, and these motifs were completely internalized in his music, permeating his greatest works (any of the Bachianas Brasileiras, for example), whether or not they have a program.

An additional musical link between Ropartz and the earlier symphonic works of Villa-Lobos may exist because of their shared adherence to the compositional teachings of Vincent d'Indy, though I'm not well enough versed in musical theory to pull out those particular threads myself.

I predict that when more information is released about these new scores, it will turn out that the Ropartz works in question have folkloric themes.

Rediscovered Villa-Lobos scores

Hard on the heels of the newly-discovered Mozart scores comes the news about previously unknown Villa-Lobos works in Rio de Janeiro. They were discovered in the library of the Escola de Música da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).

These aren't new Bachianas Brasileiras, though (or the missing Choros or Symphony), but Villa-Lobos's orchestration of four pieces by the French composer Guy Ropartz (1864-1955). Still, it would be nice to hear these, or at least learn more about them. The full story is here.

A Ciranda do Villa

A 50-minute play for children entitled "A Ciranda do Villa" premieres in Sao Paulo this weekend.

The play, written by Evill Rebouças and directed by Gira de Oliveira, narrates the life of the composer, with a back-drop of Brazilian folk-song. During a dream, the young 'Tuhu' (Villa's nickname as a boy - it means 'Flame' in the Tupi language) travels to the five regions of Brazil, encountering figures from folklore (the prankster saci, the demon curupira and the werewolf lobisomem), each of whom has a song that turns up in Villa's later compositions.

This clever concept is brought to the stage by the Cia. Lúdicos de Teatro Popular. There are two performances, on Saturday the 22nd, and Sunday the 23rd, at the Teatro de Arena Eugênio Kusnet in Sao Paulo. Thanks to this story in the Guia da Folha Online for the head's-up on this.

The Saci, by the way, is featured in the last movement of the first String Quartet "Saltando Como Um Saci" - Jumping Like a Saci. You can imagine this Loki-like figure while you listen to the Bessler-Reis quartet play it online at Radio UOL.

[Pictured to the right, Saci Pererê - Mitologia brasileira, by artist André Koehne, from the Wikipedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.]

Wilfrid Mellers on Villa-Lobos

You can't always tell what kind of article you're going to get when you look at a citation in a database:

Review: Letters from (South) America
Wilfrid Mellers
Reviewed work(s): The Villa-Lobos Letters by Lisa M. Peppercorn; Villa-Lobos
The Musical Times, Vol. 138, No. 1858 (Dec., 1997), pp. 18-20

Villa's letters often illuminate his life, and occasionally illuminate his music. Peppercorn's book presents this as well as can be expected, but in the end these are not Mozart's letters to his family.

But Mellers is a really good music critic, and a really good writer. I ended up getting an awful lot of pleasure from this three-page review article, and I learned about Villa-Lobos's music as well.

"Villa-Lobos countered Latin exuberance with Latin passivity, accepting the chaos of the contemporary scene since anything was grist to his voracious mill. He was even less self-critical than were Milhaud and Koechlin: which is why his music impresses most when it is most fortuitous."

Meller's insights are thick on the ground here. I start to quote them, and then I realize I'd need to include the whole three pages. The Musical Times might not appreciate that. But here's a good one:

"Villa-Lobos was a crossover artist long before the genre had been invented. As a lad in the streets of Rio he joined with his mates in jam-sessions wherein any number of performers, using any instruments that came to hand, improvised at random, with no more than a pulse, a metrical pattern, a chord sequence, or a snatch of half-remembered tune to keep them going, if not together."

and here is Mellers' virtuoso list of Villa's influences:

"...traces of Renaissance ecclesiastical polyphony (at which some Amerindians became oddly proficient), of Spanish zarzuela, Portuguese fado, Italian romantic opera and popular song, French vaudeville and cafe-concert, plus a few pockets of familiar Teutonic classics and a substratum of Victorian and Edwardian British salon music. Entangled with this European detritus was a Negroid strain precipitated from the slave trade, including the germs of jazz: which in turn linked up with the mechanised media culture of the United States. Whereas in the work of Europeans such as Janacek, Bartok, and Stravinsky primitivism was absorbed into civilised traditions, in Latin America the sundry layers coexisted, side by side. So Villa-Lobos's imagination teemed with musical images of the Brazilian jungle, of the lost Indian cities, of Portuguese and Spanish colonisations, and of the North American skyscraper and roadhouse."

Wilfrid Mellers was an extraordinary scholar; read the obituary that was printed in The Times Online after his death in 2005. I was struck by how widespread Mellers' interests were, both as a writer and a composer. The only book of his that I know is the 2001 Singing in the Wilderness: Music and the Ecology in the 20th Century, which includes a chapter on Villa-Lobos. I look forward to reading more Mellers. Just the titles are great enough:

• Twilight of the Gods: the Beatles in Retrospect (1973)
• Bach and the Dance of God (1980)
• Beethoven and the Voice of God (1983)
• A Darker Shade of Pale: a Backdrop to Bob Dylan (1984)

Bachianas in Aspen

The InstantEncore website has added lots of new music this summer. Here's a recent concert that you can stream online - it's from August 8th, and it features cellos from the Aspen Festival Orchestra, soprano Carla Janzen, and mezzo-soprano Jazmina MacNeil. The programme includes Bachianas Brasileiras #1, BB#5 (with Janzen), and music by George Benjamin, Anne Wilson, Julius Klengel, and Astor Piazzolla (arranged by Derek Snyder).

Harvey Steiman reviews this concert at MusicWeb International's website. Apparently there were 37 cellists on stage for the event, which was billed as "A Recital with Cellos." Like Steiman, I was impressed by the playing of the cellos in the Villa-Lobos works, and by the moving piece by Anne Wilson called "Lament (In Memory of Matthew Shepard)".

I listened to this concert on the new Aspen Music Festival iPhone application, powered by InstantEncore. This free app is a winner - I'll be listening to lots of music from Aspen while riding my bike this summer & fall.

Villa-Lobos & His Contemporaries

This week the School of Music at UFRJ in Rio de Janeiro presents a music festival entitled "Villa-Lobos e seus contemporâneos" - Villa-Lobos & his contemporaries. Concerts from August 10-14 include some very rarely-performed works such as Choros #03, the Quarteto simbolico, and the Fantasia em três movimentos em forma de choros.

The juxtaposition of these works with the music of Stravinsky, Bartok, Berg, and Webern will help to show the avante garde nature of Villa's music from the teens & 20s. This series is yet another example of how seriously everyone is taking the Ano Villa-Lobos in Brazil. You can't walk down the street in Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo without coming across a Choros or Bachianas!

It's fitting that UFRJ celebrates Villa-Lobos, since he's an alumnus of sorts. In 1903 the composer, busy with his work as a musician at bars & restaurants, registered for some music courses at the University:

“Villa-Lobos foi aluno da escola em 1903 em um curso noturno, porque ele trabalhava tocando em bares e restaurantes e, por isso, só conseguia estudar nesse curso noturno”, conta o diretor da Escola de Música da UFRJ, André Cardoso. [from a story about UFRJ music school's 160th Anniversary at the O Globo website. There's a cool video on this page: it takes a while to load, but it's worth waiting for.]

[Pictured above: the cover of this month's VivaMúsica! magazine.]

August is Villa-Lobos String Quartet Month

This began as a comment to my review of the new Dorian box-set of the complete String Quartets, but I think it deserves its own post.

August 2009 is indeed a big month for the 17 String Quartets of Villa-Lobos. Besides the release of the superb box-set of the Cuarteto Latinoamericano, and their Mexico City performance of the complete cycle later this month, we have another performance of all of the string quartets. This one is at the Museu Villa-Lobos in Rio de Janeiro, and it's by the Quarteto Radamés Gnattali, on August 12-13, 20-21, and 27-28.

Actually, I was wrong about the August concerts. I can't imagine how I screwed this up. Cariocas will have to wait until November for their complete cycle.

The Quarteto Radamés Gnattali will perform the complete string quartets on the following dates:

• At Museu Villa-Lobos: November 10, 13, 24 and 28
• At Sala Guiomar Novaes (a small auditorium located at Sala Cecília Meireles): November 16, 18 and 21
  

Thanks to Marcelo Rodolfo from the Museu Villa-Lobos for the correction and the new information.

The Gnattali Quartet website includes streaming audio of the Poco Animato movement from the sixth quartet from their Quadro Brasil CD.

Complete String Quartets box set from Dorian

"The writing is crazy, but it has a point. It's the added salsa and when you play the quartets you have to make them spicy." - first violinist Saúl Bitrán

From 1995 to 2001, the Cuarteto Latinoamericano recorded all 17 of the Villa-Lobos string quartets. These were released on the Dorian label on six individual CDs, with two or three pieces on each disc, often with early, middle, and late works mixed together for variety. The performances were hailed by most critics as the definitive performances, which is saying quite a bit. Villa's string quartets were already well-served on CD, with complete cycles by the Bessler-Reis quartet on (the late, lamented) Brazilian label Kuarup, and by the Danubius Quartet on Marco Polo. There were also recordings of individual works by the Brazilian String Quartet (#01, 06, & 17); the Stuyvesant Quartet (#06); Quadro Brasil (#06); Quarteto Brasileiro da UFRJ (#06, 11, & 17, on separate discs); and the Hollywood String Quartet (#06 again!).

As good as some of those other performances are, the Cuarteto Latinoamericano own these works; they are the best advocates I know for this amazing music.

Now Dorian has put together a box-set of the six CDs, remastered and nicely packaged (in the thinner style which takes up less shelf-space - an important factor for my Villa-Lobos CD collection!) The Dorian CDs always sounded great, and their remastering for this set polishes things up so you feel even more in the presence of the musicians. Dorian has added a seventh disc: a DVD of the group performing #01, and an interview with the musicians talking about Villa-Lobos and his music. There's a really excellent booklet with valuable notes by Juan Arturo Brennan. The pictures chosen for the set (especially the one on the cover of the booklet, which is reproduced above) give a feel for the genial composer writing for this most genial musical form.

The interview is amazing, and I plan on watching it again more carefully. The members of the Cuarteto Latinoamericano - the three Bitrán brothers (Saúl, Arón, & Alvaro) and Javier Montiel - have lived with these works for a long time, and are very thoughtful about the music not just in terms of technique and musicality, but as part of a broader idea of Latin American culture. It's interesting to compare this interview (done in 2009, I presume, or late 2008) with the one the Cuarteto gave to Ken Smith more than a decade ago (published as "Spicing up the harmonies," in The Strad, January 1997, p. 27.) I've learned so much about Villa's music from this article. These musicians who lived so long with this music have the confidence to look at it critically, and to make adjustments that the busy Villa-Lobos might have made if he had time for a second thought:

The first violin has long sections of melody in parallel fourths which work fine on the piano but are incredibly awkward on the violin. I think that he wrote too fast and never revised, because if he thought for a minute about some of his intervals, he would have changed them. This is the major problem with the quartets, because people who don't take the time to revoice [redistributing lines among parts] some passages will play them badly.

This reminds me of things Carl St. Clair said about awkware passages in the scores of the Symphonies, and that Kenneth Schermerhorn said about the Bachianas Brasileiras, whose scores were littered with errors. Andres Segovia said the same thing:

Others have written things that were impossible. Villa-Lobos, for example, was a good friend of mine, but in composing for the guitar, he would write a chord that was possible, then another chord that was also possible. But to go from the first chord to the second was impossible [laughs].

[Interviewed by Allan Kozinn, in The Guitar Player Book by Mike Molenda]

Having recorded the entire cycle of 17 string quartets and performed the cycle five times (with another coming up in Mexico City later this month), these musicians rate this music very highly. In the DVD interview Saúl Bitrán puts these works in the same league as the cycles by Bartok and Shostakovich, and says that Villa-Lobos' string quartets are much more creative and much more original than the two great 20th century series.

The string quartets include some avante-garde features (especially #03 from 1916, which was the musical centrepiece of the 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna in Sao Paulo):

Back in 1916, before Bartok or Shostakovich, he wrote a complete movement with left-hand pizzicatos and double harmonics; things no one else had ever thought of. [Arón Bitrán, from the Smith interview]

If they flirt with the exoticism which most people connect with Villa-Lobos they do so only to a certain extent. You might not recognise the string quartets as being by the same composer as the Sixth or Tenth Choros. At the end of the cycle, the string quartets become more neo-classic and less emotional. The final works, written when Villa-Lobos was ill, are meditative and suffused with "saudade", the Brazilian version of nostalgic sadness. It's really sad that Villa didn't get a chance to finish his 18th String Quartet, which he was working on when he died. Only sketches remain (they're in the Museu Villa-Lobos).

Keep an eye on the Cuarteto Latinoamericano - their excellent website is a good way to do this. It includes a concert calendar that shows how busy these four musicians are. This Sunday, August 9th, 2009, for example, they're in Santander, Spain, playing Villa's first quartet, along with Turina's fourth and the Spanish composer Agustin González Acilú's sixth quartets. This is the group's 30th anniversary year; let's hope they're around for a long, long time to come.

Villa-Lobos on Cultura FM - August 2009

Here are Villa-Lobos performances upcoming on Cultura FM from Sao Paulo. Listen here on the Internet. Times are local Sao Paulo times, one hour ahead of EST.

August 6:
13:00 DELICATESSEN com Teresa Lima:
CHOPIN - Noturno Op. 62 n° 1. Vladimir Horowitz (piano). / MOZART - Sinfonia n° 38 em ré maior K 504. Orquestra de Câmara da Europa. Reg.: Nikolaus Harnoncourt. / VILLA-LOBOS- Suíte Popular. Quinteto Villa-Lobos.

August 7:
23:00 NOTURNO:
Joaquín TURINA - Oração do Toureiro, opus 34. Orquestra Cidade de Granada. Reg.: Juan de Udaeta. / VILLA-LOBOS - Estudos 1 a 7 Narciso Yepes (violão).

August 9:
11:00 O BRASIL DE VILLA-LOBOS . Por Turíbio Santos
Bachianas Brasileiras nº 4; Bachianas Brasileiras nº 8; Choros nº 1 Villa-Lobos (violão).
Orquestra da Radiodifusão Francesa. Reg. Heitor Villa-Lobos.

August 12:
13:00 DELICATESSEN com Teresa Lima:
GLAZUNOV - Prelúdio e duas mazurkas Op. 25. Stephen Coombs (piano). / VILLA-LOBOS - Estudos para violão 1 a 5. Alexander-Sergei Ramirez (violão). / MEDTNER - Sonata n° 1 em si menor Op. 21. Manoug Parikian (violino). Hamish Milne (piano).

August 13:
07:00 DESPERTE COM OS CLÁSSICOS:
Pjotr Iyich TCHAIKOVSKY - Dumka (Cena Rústica Russa), op. 59. Lang Lang (piano)./ Heitor VILLA-LOBOS - Bachianas Brasileiras n° 2. Orquestra Filarmônica Real Britânica. Reg.: Enrique Bátiz. / Jean SIBELIUS - O Cisne de Tuonela. Orquestra de Filadélfia. Reg.: Eugen Ormandy. / Wolfgang Amadeus MOZART - ária "Prigionier che fa ritorno, do oratório "Betulia Liberata", K. 118. Nathalie Stutzmann (contralto). Moscou Virtuosi. Dir.: Vladimir Spivakov. / Hekel TAVARES - Modinha, primeiro movimento do concerto para piano em formas brasileiras. Arnaldo Cohen (piano). Orquestra Sinfônica Petrobrás Pró-Música. Reg.: Roberto Tibiriçá.

August 15:
09:00 O PRAZER DA MÚSICA com Marcelo Jaffè:
50 anos sem Villa Lobos.

August 16:
11:00 O BRASIL DE VILLA-LOBOS Por Turíbio Santos:
Sonata nº 2 para violoncelo e piano; Trio nº 1 em dó menor. Prelúdio nº 14. Tânia Lisboa (violoncelo) e Mirian Braga (piano).
22:00 KALEIDOSCÓPIO com Almeida Prado:
Bruno MANTOVANI - Concerto para Violoncelo e Orquestra. Orquestra Sinfônica da Rádio de Saarbrucken. Reg. Günther Herbig../ Philippe SCHVELLER - Concerto para violoncelo e Orquestra. Orquestra Filarmônica da Rádio França. Reg. Alexander Briger. Jean Guihen (solista). / Heitor VILLA-LOBOS - Choros nº 10 - Simon Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, Schola Cantorum de Caracas. Reg. Eduardo Mata

August 18:
12:00 CONCERTOS DO MEIO-DIA com o Maestro Walter Lourenção:
Terceira Suíte de "Descobrimento do Brasil" de Heitor VILLA-LOBOS pelo maestro Roberto Duarte.

August 19:
13:00 DELICATESSEN com Teresa Lima:
VILLA-LOBOS - Capriccio em C maior Op. 49. Marcio Carneiro (violoncelo), Werner Genuit (piano). / Edvard GRIEG - Balada para piano em sol menor Op. 24.

August 20:
21:00 SALA DE CONCERTO:
Heitor VILLA-LOBOS - Uirapuru. Orquestra Sinfônica Simon Bolívar da Venezuela. Reg.: Eduardo Mata. / Carlos CHÁVEZ - Suite de Cavalos de Vapor. Orquestra Sinfônica Simon Bolívar da Venezuela. Reg.: Eduardo Mata. / Alberto Ginastera - Estância. Orquestra Sinfônica Simon Bolívar da Venezuela. Reg.: Eduardo Mata. / Silvestre REVUELTAS - La Noche de los Mayas. Orquestra Sinfônica do estado do México. Reg.: Enrique Batiz. / Manuel PONCE - Concierto del sur. Sharon Isbin (violão). Orquestra Filarmônica de Nova York. Reg.: José Serebrier.

August 21:
23:00 NOTURNO:
VILLA-LOBOS - Canção do Amor. Renée Fleming (soprano). Orquestra da Rádio de Msocou. Dir.: Alfred Heller

August 22:
10:00 CIRANDA - Academia Brasileira de Música:
VILLA-LOBOS - Choros 10. Schola Cantorum de Caracas. Orquestra Sinfônica Simon Bolívar da Venzeuela. Reg.: Eduardo mata. / GUERRA PEIXE- Prelúdios Tropicais. Martha Marchena (piano).

August 23:
11:00 O BRASIL DE VILLA-LOBOS . Por Turíbio Santos.
Concerto nº 5 para piano e Orquestra; Sinfonia nº 4. Orquestra da Radiodifusão Francesa. Reg. Heitor Villa-Lobos. Felicia Blumental (piano) Obras do Guia Prático. Orquestra Villa-Lobinhos. Reg. Sergio Barbosa

August 25:
13:00 DELICATESSEN com Teresa Lima:
MEDTNER - Sonata n° 2 em sol maior Op. 44. Manoug Parikian (violino). Hamish Milne (violino). / VILLA-LOBOS - Quarteto de cordas n° 6. Quarteto Radamés Gnattali.

August 27:
23:00 NOTURNO:
Francis POULENC - Valsa e Pastoral. Marcelo Bratke (piano). / Sergio BARBOZA - Supite Ugupu. Turíbio Santos (violão). / VILLA-LOBOS - O canto do capadócio. / Berceuse. Rebecca Rust (cello). David Pater (piano).

August 30:
11:00 O BRASIL DE VILLA-LOBOS . Por Turíbio Santos.
Quartetos nº 1 e nº 2. Quarteto Bessler Reis; Sexteto Místico. Quinteto Villa-Lobos e convidados. Valsa da Dor. Arnaldo Estrela (piano)