Yerma in Sao Paulo

Here are some scenes from last month's production of Magdalena at the Theatro Municipal in Sao Paulo.

Jules Dassin Dead at 96

Director Jules Dassin died yesterday at the age of 96.

Dassin, who is better known today as a Hollywood director (and Hollywood Blacklist victim) than a Broadway director, directed the Villa-Lobos Broadway Musical Magdalena in 1948.



My favourite films of Dassin are Rififi, Topkapi, and The Naked City.

The story of Magdalena

The Writers' Guild of America strike is currently making plenty of news, as did the Broadway Stagehands' strike which ended last November. Something like this had an impact on the life of Villa-Lobos in 1948, in connection with his show Magdalena:

"Magdalena ran into a musicians' strike and became a cause célèbre when the producers claimed the piece was immune from union rules because it was not a musical but an opera. After deliberating, the union announced that, since it was playing in a legitimate theater, it was not an opera but a musical, and closed it, along with all the other musicals. And you thought it didn't matter."

[from a 2002 New York Times article by William Wright]

I'm putting together the page for Magdalena on The Villa-Lobos Website. It's well-timed, with the 60th Anniversary of the show coming up, and with so many resources out there to lassoo and bring together. It's the kind of stuff I like doing. So come on over and see the new page, but it's a work in progress, so watch out for the scaffolding.

Andre Kostelanetz plays music of Villa-Lobos

In 1974 Columbia (CBS) records released an LP of music performed by the great master of light music, Andre Kostelanetz. All of the pieces were by Villa-Lobos, some in arrangements by Kostelanetz. The LP (M 32821, CBS 61564) shows up in many lists of favourite "easy-listening" classics on the Internet. The highlight for me is the Suite from Magdalena (Villa-Lobos's operetta/Broadway musical of 1948). For more information on the original work, see Ricardo Prado's excellent essay, in Lee Boyd's excellent translation.

Kostelanetz's version of the work points up the full-blown kitschy charm of Villa's music - this is definitely the master letting his hair down! Not profound music, but definitely fun. As Prado says, Villa-Lobos "re-fashioned" many of his favourite melodies - some famous and some lifted from obscure works of his past.

The Kostelanetz LP hasn't been reissued on CD (though I think it would sell well, judging by the recent mini-boom in Villa-Lobos recordings), so you'll need to search it out in libraries (the University of Alberta has a copy) or used-disc stores and websites. The only CD of the complete musical, which Prado praises highly, is hard to come by - I had an order in at amazon.com forever, and it was finally cancelled.



The Teatro Amazonas, a great opera house in the tropical rain-forest.

Your best bet for hearing this music: go to the VII FESTIVAL AMAZONAS DE ÓPERA at the great tropical opera house in Manaus. Magdalena will be performed on the 26th and 29th of April and the 1st of May, with Ligia Amadio conducting the Amazonas Filarmônica, the Coral do Amazonas, the Corpo de Dança do Amazonas and a Coral Infantil. A last minute trip to Brazil would be nice...

Thanks to Bert Berenschot for providing this amazingly entertaining music.

Magdalena on CD

In a recent posting (Oct 27) I mistakenly said "Though Magdalena has recently been revived around the world (in Germany and in Los Angeles in 1999), we still need a good modern CD to bring this music to the attention of the large new Villa-Lobos fan base that's grown up in the last ten years" As my friend Bert Berenschot has pointed out: 'This "good modern cd" is available for years (since 1989) on Sony Records.' Bert goes on to note that 'At Amazon it is filed under Popular Music, as are many other Villa-Lobos cd's! Some things go very wrong at Amazon. For example all Kuarup records of Villa-Lobos are filed at popular.' Check out Magdalena here.

Thanks so much for the correction, Bert. I haven't heard this music yet, but I have my order in at Amazon. Actually, Ricardo Prado mentions the recording in his column, though he says that it's out of print. According to their website, Amazon will ship in 3 to 4 days.

While you're at Amazon, check out Bert's reviews and Villa-Lobos lists - I think very highly of Bert's critical faculties: he knows his Villa-Lobos!

Here's a very interesting site that deserves further investigation. Unfortunately for me, it's entirely in Portuguese. I use Altavista's Babelfish online translation service to get a feel for what's happening in Portuguese websites or e-mails, but the state of the art of machine translation just isn't ready for something like this.

The site is Crônica de Érico Veríssimo sobre os encontros e as vivências dele com Villa-Lobos. Verissimo apparently knew Villa-Lobos, in Brazil in the 20's, and later in Los Angeles. The report of happenings in L.A. has apparently been the cause of some controversy. A recent article in the May 2001 issue of Brasiliana (the journal of the Brazilian Academy of Music) includes an article by Robert Stevenson discussing the visit. Here, from the Academy's website, is an abstract of the article:

Abstract - "Villa-Lobos visit to Los Angeles", Robert Stevenson
"Exchange of acrid remarks, scorn and unpleasantness seem to have been the note of the meeting between two important figures of Brazilian culture in USA, in 1944. Hector Villa-Lobos was visiting the country and Erico Verissimo, who was there for a series of lectures, acted as his interpreter. The article raises questions about the story told by Verissimo, confronting it with the newspapers' accounts made at the time, ascertaining ill-founded pieces of information. The author detects that personal issues led the writer to make a not very benign portrayal of Villa-Lobos."

I'm anxious to get an English translation of the Verissimo memoir. The players are of great interest: Lukas Foss, Werner Janssen, Walt Disney. I'll report on this in the future.

Ricardo Prado column

Darn! I'm going to have to learn to read Portuguese!

This article from columnist Ricardo Prado : Villa-Lobos na Broadway, discusses an important period in VL's life, when he was invited by producers Edwin Lester and Homer Curran to go to New York to write a Broadway musical.

From what I've been able to piece together from the often mangled Altavista Babel Fish machine translation (hey, I'm not complaining - it's a fabulous service!), Prado has some great stories to tell. Lester and Curran were known world-wide for their production of The Song of Norway, based on the life of Edvard Grieg. In 1959 they brought the team of Bob Wright and Chet Forrest, successful scriptwriters of a million MGM films and Broadway musicals, to New York to work with the world-famous Brazilian composer. Wright and Forrest came up with a pretty good story for a "musical adventure in two acts" - it was called Magdalena.

Language was also a problem for the Magdalena collaborators. VL's English stretched to the two things he liked best about North America: "vanilla ice cream" and "cowboy movies". The others had no Portuguese, so they all made do with gestures and bits of French. There seem to have been the kind of conflicts between the American commercial point of view and VL's more artistic sensibilities that became more rancorous in the 1950's when the composer went to Hollywood to write the music for Green Mansions at MGM. At one point VL had to remind everyone that, while Grieg was dead, he himself was still alive!

The production at the Ziegfeld Theater was a big success - the critics gave it raves, including one that said it represented "a new path for the musical theater." Richard Rogers said that it was 25 years ahead of its time, and saw its influence, eight years later, in Leonard Bernstein's score for West Side Story. Unfortunately, VL couldn't build upon his New York success for two reasons. James C. Petrillo's American Music Federation strike had shut down the bulk of recordings of new music, and VL was diagnosed with the liver cancer that would kill him late in the following decade.

Though Magdalena has recently been revived around the world (in Germany and in Los Angeles in 1999), we still need a good modern CD to bring this music to the attention of the large new Villa-Lobos fan base that's grown up in the last ten years. Prado himself worked on a major production of the piece in 1997, with the support of Turíbio Santos, director of the Museu Villa-Lobos, and money from a major Brazilian bank. Again events conspired against wider acceptance for the piece, when the bank was taken over by a foreign company. We can only hope for an important new production in Brazil or New York, followed by an excellent live recording.

Hey - enough blogging for one day! I think I'll scoop out some vanilla ice cream and watch a cowboy video on TV!