Symphony #10 from cpo

Carl St. Clair's excellent series of Villa-Lobos Symphonies on the cpo label comes to a big finish with the recent release of Symphony #10. Here's information on the new release, with some sound clips, from the German JPC online music store.

Though most of the works in the cpo series were either completely unknown, or had only a single rival on CD, there are two recent versions of Symphony #10 easily available. One is a Harmonia Mundi release from 2003, with Carmen Cruz Simo conducting the Tenerife Symphony Orchestra. The other is from Koch International, released in 2000, with Gisele Ben-Dor conducting the Santa Barbara Symphony Orchestra.

I'm looking forward to listening to more than just clips from the new cpo release. The culmination of the Symphonies series is a really amazing accomplishment by St. Clair, his Stuttgart players, and cpo. It will take some time before we can properly judge Villa-Lobos as a symphonist, placing his symphonic cycles among his other great cycles: the Bachianas, the Choros, the String Quartets, the orchestral tone poems, and the concertos. This couldn't have happened without these discs.

Congratulations, Carl!

[thanks to Borris Mayer for the heads-up on this]

More Digitization

As exciting as the previous post on the Villa-Lobos home movies was, here's an even bigger story.

Earlier this week conditional approval was given for a new project costing R$867,000 (about $490,000), which will digitize the orchestral and chamber music scores of Villa-Lobos, and make them freely available online and on CD-ROM. The focus of the project will be on the Symphonies (none of which is easily available in study score format). A catalogue of the works in the project will have a print run of 1,800.

The project will take place in 2008, and will be complete in time for the 50th anniversary of Villa-Lobos's death in 2009.

Symphony no. 10 on Harmonia Mundi

I'm back after a long break. Hope you're all still out there...

The BBC's Classical Review website is featuring the new CD from Harmonia Mundi of Symphony no. 10 'Amerindia', with the Orquesta Sinfonica De Tenerife conducted by Victor Pablo Perez.


The new Harmonia Mundi Cd of Symphony 10

After only a couple of VL symphony recordings until just before the turn of the millennium, we can now choose between labels, orchestras and conductors for more than a few of the eleven symphonies. The BBC review by Andrew MacGregor notes that there are three recordings of no. 10, one of which has not been released. This would be a key disc in the soon-to-be-completed Carl St. Clair Stuttgart project of the complete symphonies. Recently Bert Berenschot let me know about the latest release in that series: Symphony no. 7 and Sinfonietta no. 1.

CPO's new CD of Symphony 7

The first recording of no. 10 was of course the Koch International Classics recording by Gisele Ben-Dor and the Santa Barbara Symphony. This disc has been a favourite of mine since it was released in 2000.

Koch's Symphony no. 10 with Gisele Ben-Dor

The BBC page has short RealAudio clips from the first and fifth movements of the Tenerife CD that give you an idea of the kind of music to expect, if not the sound quality. I'm looking forward to listening to the new disc more closely.

Here, by the way, is Bert Berenshot's posting to rec.music.classical.recordings on the new cpo disc:

"Finally CPO released another cd in the Villa-Lobos cycle of 12 symphonies, conducted by Carl St. Clair. This time we get Symphony no.7 combined with the Sinfonietta no.1 (1916). The complexity of Symphony no. 7 dates almost audible from 1945, the same year Villa-Lobos wrote his most complex Piano Concerto (no. 1) and his most complex String Quartet (no. 9). All pieces contain more dissonant and even atonal sections he didn't write any more after 1930. Surely he did write them in the period 1917-1930 in pieces like Amazonas, Choros no. 8 and 11, the Trio and some others, but in a different way, more influenced by the 'primitivism' of those days. Symphony no. 7 is with 36 minutes longer than most of his symphonies and is a impressive piece starting with those orchestral glissandi we already know from the opening of Uirapuru and Symphony no. 11 and somewhere at the end of Genesis.

"It is combined with the early Sinfonietta no. 1 of 1916 which is much lighter and more transparant, composed for a Mozart-size orchestra and written in memoriam Mozart. It runs 23 minutes and is nice but still less typical Villa-Lobos.
So, now we still have to wait for the CPO release of no. 2 (a long piece of one hour, only recorded in the '40's by the Jansen Symphony of Los Angeles) and the choral 10th (Amerindia), already two times recorded by others the last years.

"See http://www.jpc.de/jpcng/cpo/detail/-/hnum/1561100/rk/classic/rsk/notepad for information and sound samples. Until February 15th they sell it cheaper. I suppose it takes some weeks before it will be available elsewhere.

"Bert B."

Thanks for this, Bert - as usual you're on the leading edge of the Villa-Lobos recording world.

New Symphonies CD

"A new Symphony by Heitor Villa-Lobos is a world event."

- from a review in the Christian Science Monitor of the premiere of the 11th Symphony (quoted in Vasco Mariz's Heitor Villa-Lobos: Life & Work of the Brazilian Composer (1970).

Though it hasn't shown up at Amazon.com (or the other Amazon sites around the world), the new cpo CD of Symphonies 3 & 9 conducted by Carl St. Clair can be purchased from the European site JPC. Thanks to Bert Berenschot in the Netherlands for this update. Check here for all the information, including sound samples. I haven't ordered from JPC myself, but the CD is certainly a good buy at US$11.96 (13.99 Euros). As Mariz says, "The Ninth Symphony seems to have been composed in 1951 but has never been performed, and I have no data on it." So this release is certainly of world-wide interest to music lovers.

The early 3rd Symphony makes up the bulk of the rest of the disc, which has a nice filler in the "Ouverture de l'Homme Tel." I've often seen this work in lists of Max Eschig publications, and wondered what it sounded like. The short Real Audio excerpt on the JPC site includes only a fanfare, but you can tell from the clips that the orchestral playing from St. Clair's Stuttgart forces remains of the highest quality. I'm certainly looking forward to this one!

New Symphonies Recording on its Way

Here is some interesting news from the very knowledgeable and well-connected Dutch Villa-Lobos fan Bert Berenschot:

"Some news from a spokesman of CPO: they will release the 3th and 9th symphony in september. In august they will release a cd with (a.o.) the amazing String Trio."

This is good news - the excellent Carl St. Clair Stuttgart Integral Symphonies series on cpo records is winding down. This release should be as interesting as any in the series: neither of these works is at all well-known. I've heard neither, and haven't heard of any recordings. It's also great to have a new version of the String Trio on CD.

Thanks, Bert, for this update.

Ben-Dor Feature

Conductor Gisele Ben-Dor was recently featured in Fanfare magazine. Ben-Dor's recent recording of VL's 10th Symphony was given a rave review by the critic Paul Snook.