New Bratke piano disc

T
he third volume in Marcelo Bratke's complete Villa-Lobos piano music series is now out from Quartz Music.

The Cello Fantasia

Lars Hoefs and Rose Chen play the 2nd movement of the piano & cello version of the Fantasia for Cello & Orchestra. This is a great work, and one that I've been thinking about lots since I heard about the recent death of Janos Starker. Starker played the work with the Paraiba Symphony Orchestra conducted by Eleazar de Carvalho, on a classic Delos CD called A Brazilian Extravaganza.

The cello and the guitar were Villa-Lobos's two favourite instruments: the ones he dreamed in. When I think of Villa-Lobos, I hear the sound of the cello (or lots of cellos) in my head.

Bachianas Brasileiras #3 in Barcelona

The Third Bachianas Brasileiras is, after the 8th, the least-performed of the 9 works in Villa-Lobos's most popular series. It's a big, sprawling piano concerto, and it deserves to be played more often. Alexandre Tharaud and L'Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona under conductor Hernández Silva will perform the work three times in early May.

Here are the latest numbers for performances in the Villa-Lobos Concert Database (2001-2013):

• Bachianas Brasileiras #1 (89)
• Bachianas Brasileiras #2 (142)
• Bachianas Brasileiras #3 (27)
• Bachianas Brasileiras #4 (236)
• Bachianas Brasileiras #5 (377)
• Bachianas Brasileiras #6 (82)
• Bachianas Brasileiras #7 (33)
• Bachianas Brasileiras #8 (22)
• Bachianas Brasileiras #9 (103)

Leonard Bernstein's The Latin American Spirit

 

Part of the script for Leonard Bernstein's The Latin American Spirit, one of his famous Young People's Concerts broadcast on CBS Television. The full script is here. and the original marked-up scripts can be found at the Library of Congress website.

Uirapuru from Madrid

From Madrid, a performance of Villa's first great orchestral work, Uirapuru. This is from a November 2012 concert. Carlos Kalmar conducts the Orquesta Sinfonica de RTVE.

Carlé Costa concert in Lucerne

Carlé Costa plays the 12 Etudes at a concert in Lucerne in June. I highly recommend his recent Villa-Lobos CD Alma de uma terra.

OSB plays BB#7

The last movement from Bachianas Brasileiras no. 7, played by OSB, conducted by Roberto Minczuk. This is a from a concert earlier this month.

Amilton Godoy plays O trenzinho do Caipira

Pianist Amilton Godoy plays a beautiful jazz arrangement of the Trenzinho do Caipira movement from Bachianas Brasileiras no. 2, which has become almost a national song in Brazil.

The Talich String Quartet plays Villa-Lobos

The Talich String Quartet recently added the 1st Villa-Lobos String Quartet to their repertoire, playing it in a January 2013 concert in Switzerland. They play the Melancolia 5th movement in this live recording from Vermont Public Radio. The Villa-Lobos finishes the program, after music by Beethoven, Dvorak, Ravel and Debussy.

The future of the Heitor Villa-Lobos Website.

This is the 19th year of the Heitor Villa-Lobos Website, which has been an information resource on the web since before blogs, Twitter, even before Google. The website is hosted by Red Deer Public Library, a great organization that I've been Director of all that time. As I look towards my retirement from the Library in July 2013, though, it's time to make a change or even retire the site.

I'm wondering if there's an organization out there that might want to host this site. It would be a shame to lose the information on more than 950 recordings, and especially the fairly comprehensive database of concerts from 1999 to the present. A new host could either post a read-only archive of the existing site, or add content moving forward. Let me know if you have any ideas!

The site has had some significant traffic: 425,000 visits and 1.2 million page views since Google Analytics was turned on in 2008. This is from 205 countries, with 23% of the traffic from Brazil, 22% from the US, and 5% from each of the UK, Canada, & Germany. The site is built in Drupal v.5.

Villa-Lobos the Modernist

Here is a compressed version of an important concert from last October, from the Maison du Brésil at Cité Universitaire in Paris. Felipe Magalhães organized and conducted the event, which focused on Villa-Lobos the modernist. The Choros series naturally were an important part of the program, with #01, 02, 05 and the rarely performed #03 and #07. It was great to see a performance of the great Quarteto simbolico (Quatuor symbolique) with the optional female choir (though a piano stood in for the celesta which adds so much to this piece's sound.)

Villa-Lobos Centennial

From O Globo's Projeto Aquarius photo gallery comes this picture from the 1987 celebration of the Villa-Lobos Centennial. I'm guessing the guy on the left is from Descobrimento do Brasil, but I can't for the life of me figure out the weird figure to the left of the Amazon Indian. The photo is by Luiz Avila.

 

The picture caption: "1987 - O Projeto Aquarius prestou homenagem a Heitor Villa-Lobos no ano de seu centenário. No programa, 11 obras do compositor, das 'Bachianas' ao 'Trenzinho do caipira', que o público ouviu na Quinta da Boa Vista mais uma vez lotada."

Villa-Lobos: the Albuquerque Connection

"Speaking of the cello, I wish to remember here the cello art of Villa-Lobos. His performances evoked well what he must have been earlier, the young cellist Villa-Lobos.

"He still played with gallantry, with perfect intonation, and with such virtuosity. Not without effort. He arose at eight in the morning and practiced until lunch, and all the time . . . with the inseparable cigar in his mouth. What a curious temperament!"

This is pianist João de Souza Lima speaking of his old friend Villa-Lobos, in a 1967 lecture. Printed in 1969 in Presença de Villa-Lobos, we now have an English translation thanks to Fred Sturm.This entertaining memoir adds so much to one's understanding of Villa's character.

Fred has added a number of really interesting items to his website that advance Villa-Lobos scholarship. The most important is his translation of Antônio Chechim Filho's Excursão Artística Villa-Lobos, the fascinating story of Villa-Lobos's 1931 excursion to rural Brazil by the team's piano technician. Another is the section of family life from Luis Guimarães Villa-Lobos, Visto da plateia e na intimidade, by Villa's first wife. Finally, Fred has added scans of the Cirandas as they appear in the original Guia pratico, which will be of great interest to pianists.

Fred continues his valuable Villa-Lobos performances this spring, with all-Villa-Lobos concerts at UNM in March and May 2013, and a Villa-Lobos/Nazareth/Milhaud concert at the Outpost Performance Space. New Mexico has always been important to Villa-Lobos fans because of the 1971 production of Yerma by the Santa Fe Opera. Now Fred Sturm is turning Albuquerque into a prime Villa-Lobos city, with his concerts, recordings and scholarship.

Here's Sexteto mistico, from a concert Fred organized last February. The whole 125th Anniversary Concert is available on YouTube here.

Symphony no. 10 in Sao Paulo

 

The Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra (OSESP) continues their series of complete performances of Villa-Lobos's Symphonies with the presentation of no. 10 this weekend. This is a big, big work in the style of Choros no. 10. It was written in 1952 in celebration of the 400th anniversary of the city of Sao Paulo.

And while OSESP and Isaac Karabtchevsky continue their recordings of the series for Naxos, the second CD (with #3 & 4) is all set to be released early next month.

Total Immersion: Villa-Lobos

I've been writing about Villa-Lobos on the Internet for 19 years, and in that time I've seen a major shift in Villa's reputation. Here's an indication that the music of Villa-Lobos may be moving even closer to the mainstream. The Barbican Centre will be presenting Total Immersion: Villa-Lobos, an entire day of his music, with concerts by the BBC Singers, the Guildhall Music Ensemble, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. One of the great things about the event is that some very important but rarely programmed works are featured, including Choros #08, Descobrimento do Brasil, and the choral version of Bachianas Brasileiras #9.

The climax of the day is Choros #10, which knocked the socks off Londoners when it was featured in the 2009 Last Night of the Proms. I'm already looking into travel arrangements for this special day!

Stefan Barcsay's Nocturnes

Here, a bit late, is my review of  Stefan Barcsay's excellent CD Nocturnes.

As Martin Wilkening states in his illuminating long liner-note essay, all of the pieces on Stefan Barcsay's Nocturnes relate in some way to the 19th century character pieces written for piano: by Chopin, Schumann, Debussy and others. The character piece in this tradition needs to do only one thing, but it's a very, very hard thing to do right. It must paint for the audience a picture. Writing music like this for guitar has advantages, for the five strings can evoke nearly as wide a range as the piano, and the guitar tradition brings with it built-in connections to the landscapes of Iberia and South America.

This disc of character pieces for guitar juxtaposes a series of works written in the late 20th century with the (arguably) greatest series of character pieces in the entire guitar repertoire, the five Villa-Lobos Preludes. The Villa-Lobos Preludes were written in 1940, and judging by their popularity in recital, in the recording studio and on YouTube, nearly every classical guitarist feels the need to master this 20 minutes of music.

Part of the appeal of this music is, I believe, the strikingly real pictures that Villa-Lobos paints in each prelude: a home-spun farmer from the poor, dry north-east of Brazil; a colourful small-time urban gangster; the abstract beauty of Bach; the mystical, eternal Amazonian Indian; and a street musician of Rio (a self-portrait, perhaps, from Villa's time as a teenage guitarist playing with the choros bands). It requires musical imagination as well as technical mastery to make this music come alive, and German guitarist Stefan Barcsay has both. This is a very satisfying series of Preludes which holds its own among the bewildering variety on disc.

What of the works by the four composers who were all born after Villa-Lobos wrote his preludes, but before Villa-Lobos died in 1959? Enjott Schneider who wrote his three Nocturnes for Barcsay, Dusan Bogdanovic, Richard Heller and Ross Edwards all provide a focus on the mysterious, with shifting harmonies that evoke landscapes lit or obscured by clouds passing in front of the moon. The most interesting of the pieces, Ross Edwards' second Blackwattle Caprice, Richard Heller's second Impromptu and Schneider's second Nocturne, add interest through insistent folk music rhythms. Each of these works perhaps owe as much to Villa's Etudes, which transform technical exercises into abstractly beautiful music, as they do to the pure story-telling of the Preludes. All are interesting and colourful, if not quite the works of towering genius that finish this marvellous CD.

This is very highly recommended.

1940s Caricature of Villa-Lobos

An article from the Washington Times Herald of January 30, 1949. This is from the Gallica Digital Library; unfortunately, there's no higher resolution version available.

The caption reads "Batoneer From Brazil: Heitor Villa-Lobos, Brazil's leading composer, will be guest conductor of the National Symphony today in Constitution Hall. His program includes music inspired by the savage rhythms he has heard in Brazilian jungles."

It's hard to decipher all the text of the story by Glenn Dillard Gunn, but what I can make out is very interesting, in a gossipy way. Gunn visited Villa-Lobos in Rio in 1940, during Stokowski's visit. Meeting Villa-Lobos at his office, he noticed the composer was uncommunicative and edgy.

"Then I learned why he was nervous. He wanted to get to the Teatro Municipale, where Stokowski was rehearsing his new piano concerto. The pianist, a statuesque blonde named Tagliaferro, did not please him. Nor, seemingly, did Stokowski."

Villa-Lobos String Quartets on DVD

The recent DVD by the Radamés Gnattali Quartet of the complete Villa-Lobos String Quartets is a nominee for the 24th Brazilian Music Awards. Here is the 1st movement of the great 7th Quartet, taken from that set.

Another symphony disc from Karabtchevsky & OSESP

Coming soon: the eagerly-awaited next issue in the complete symphonies series from Naxos. Isaac Karabtchevsky conducts OSESP, the Sao Paulo State Symphony Orchestra, in the 3rd and 4th symphonies, both written in the year 1919.  The disc will be available at Amazon.com on February 26.

 

After the war, with such important orchestral works as Uirapuru and Amazonas under his belt, Villa-Lobos was ready to try out some more formal writing for large orchestra. In the 4th symphony especially his work on large canvasses began to pay off, though once the 1920s began he moved to a more modernist style, and shifted his focus to chamber and instrumental works. He wouldn't return to the symphony until the 2nd World War, with #6 in 1944.

New York Skyline arranged for flute & guitar

An arrangement of New York Skyline for the NYC Duo, by Michael Gilsinan.