Poema de Itabira

Contralto Maura Moreira sings Heitor Villa-Lobos's masterful song Poema de Itabira, with Walter Hendl conducting the National Symphony Orchestra. This was recorded at the 4th Inter-American Music Festival, at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia MD, in 1968, and we once again thank Rodrigo Roderico for bringing this to our attention.

"In 1941, Villa-Lobos composed what is perhaps his most ambitious and original work for solo voice with piano or with orchestra, entitled Poema de Itabira, on a text by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, dedicated to Marian Anderson. In his work the composer has endeavoured to use the human voice as a musical instrument, making it in effect the soloist in a kind of concerto for voice and orchestra. The music has no overt Brazilian elements, but may be regarded as impregnated with Brazilian 'atmosphere'."

- Denis Stevens, A history of song, 1970

I've posted about Villa-Lobos's relationship with Marian Anderson a number of times at The Villa-Lobos Magazine. I'll plunder a couple of them with this interesting information:

The year before Marian Anderson's Easter Sunday 1939 concert on The Mall in Washington DC, the great singer met Villa-Lobos in Rio de Janeiro. The two hit it off, and we have this fine photograph (with Mindinha) to document the friendship. This was taken at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on March 14, 1945, at a reception in the composer's honour.

Allan Keiler, in Marian Anderson: a singer's journey (University of Illinois Press, 2002), continues the story:

"She was struggling to learn the Poema de Itabira, a difficult work both rhythmically and melodically, for solo voice and orchestra by Villa-Lobos, which she was scheduled to perform at a pair of concerts with Paul Paray and the Detroit Symphony in December [1954]. Set to a Portuguese text by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, the Poema protrays the emotionally desperate feelings of de Andrade's characters, orchestrated so as to conjure up the starkness of the desert of Itabira. Anderson had met Villa-Lobos during the war while on a tour of South America. It was with Anderson's voice in mind that Villa-Lobos had composed the Poema several years later, dedicating the work to Anderson. Never having sung it before, she wanted badly to satisfy the composer." (p. 268)

There doesn't seem to be a surviving recording of Marian Anderson singing this work. Indeed, I've never come across it on CD. Baritone Renato Mismetti gives an impressive performance of the work (in the voice & piano version, with Maximiliano de Brito providing the accompaniment) on this video.