The ‘Chôro’ is a popular urban type of music used by street serenaders in Rio de Janeiro. Villa-Lobos took this simple style and in his various Chôros created a new and vibrant form of orchestral music. Chôros No. 8 was conceived in Paris and completed in Rio. It offers music of barbaric intensity, exotic in scoring and rhythms, which draws upon the composer’s close familiarity with the music of his own country, as well as containing many of the orchestral and harmonic techniques favoured in Paris during the 1920s. Chôros No. 9 was composed in 1929, and also belongs to Villa-Lobos’s French period. This fine work encompasses a wide variety of texture and mood, from parody to lyricism, as well as insistent and highly characteristic dance rhythms, all of which are unified in a triumphal conclusion.