Bachianas Brasileiras no. 9 with the OSB

Roberto Minczuk conducts the Orquestra Sinfônica Brasileira in the 9th Bachianas Brasileiras, from an August 2013 concert.

Choros no. 7 from Iowa

 

This concert from Ames, Iowa includes one of Villa's greatest works, the 7th Choros, and a key piece by his close friend Edgard Varese. I'm looking forward to hearing all four works. The concert will be streamed live at http://www.music.iastate.edu/feeds/recital/ tomorrow, October 24, 2013, at 7:30pm CDT. 

I couldn't find out much about the Neil Thornock piece "Lurgy" on the web, though as a big Goon Show fan, I'm hoping it makes reference to the episode "Lurgi Strikes Britain". The dreaded lurgi!

Another performance of the 3rd Symphony

 
I mentioned in a post yesterday that I hoped the newly-revised scores of the Villa-Lobos Symphonies would result in more performances. Here's one, with conductor Isaac Karabtchevsky (a supervisor on the score publication project) and the Orquestra Petrobras Sinfônica. This is the last movement of Symphony #03, from April 2013.

Symphony scores from Criadores do Brasil

 

The new series of Villa-Lobos Symphonies recordings on Naxos has been based on revised scores prepared by Thomas Hansen, Cláudio de Freitas, João Maurício Galindo and conductor Isaac Karabtchevsky, published by Criadores do Brasil. The scores for Symphonies 3, 4, 6 and 7 are included in this catalogue, available for purchase and rental. I hope this easier availability might increase the chances of hearing these works in concert halls around the world.

Festival Villa-Lobos preview

A very cool preview of the 51st Annual Festival Villa-Lobos, coming to Rio de Janeiro this November.

Nicholson Baker on Villa-Lobos

Nicholson Baker's new novel Traveling Sprinkler includes a long, beautifully written passage about Victoria de los Angeles's classic recording of Bachianas Brasileiras #5:

"She sings like a mad tropical bird, and it's just a fondue of molten wanting and grieving and everything that you wish you could remember and feel and know."

I once compared BB#5 to a 'black box'. Baker is one of the few people I've come across who can go inside the box and tell us something insightful and interesting about what he's heard.

51st Festival Villa-Lobos

 

The Museu Villa-Lobos in Rio de Janeiro is the site of another Festival Villa-Lobos; the 51st annual event takes place from November 8-24, 2013. Follow the Festival on Twitter, on Facebook, and at the Festival's website.

Violin Sonatas from Germany

 

A new CD of Villa-Lobos's music for violin and piano comes from the German label Telos Music. Violinist Laurent Breuninger and pianist Ana Flavia Frazao play the 3 sonatas and 6 shorter pieces. I'm looking forward to hearing this; especially the third sonata, which is a favourite chamber work. You can buy the CD at JPC.

The Villa-Lobos Website moves to Indiana

The Heitor Villa-Lobos Website, originally at http://www.villalobos.ca from 1994 to 2013, will soon be resurrected at its new home: the Latin American Music Center at Indiana University.

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.)