Heitor Villa⁠-⁠Lobos

Heitor Villa-Lobos’s first two symphonies take the European tradition head-on, absorbing French models prevalent in Brazil in the early 20th century. The confident swagger of the First Symphony is characteristic of Villa-Lobos’s ‘Brazilianness’, while the cyclical Second Symphony filters myriad influences including the music of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy and Puccini. Its slow movement 7 heralds the affecting melodic content that would later become the trademark of the Bachianas Brasileiras (Naxos 8.557460-62). This is the sixth and final volume of an acclaimed complete edition of Villa-Lobos’s symphonies in which ‘Karabtchevsky leads the way’ (Gramophone).

Villa-Lobos’s War and Victory Symphonies were commissioned by the Brazilian government following the end of the country’s involvement in World War I. Using very large orchestral forces, and conveying the composer’s feelings about the conflict with no sense of triumphalism, the two Symphonies display a confident use of unusual and evocative effects, such as the collage of fragments of the Brazilian national anthem and La Marseillaise in the ‘Battle’ movement of the Third Symphony.

Heitor Villa-Lobos is generally acknowledged as Latin America’s foremost nationalist composer and his best known works, such as the Bachianas Brasileiras (Naxos 8.557460–62), have tended to overshadow the rest of his work. Symphony No. 6, which launched his mature symphonic style, derives some of its themes from the contours of Brazilian hills and mountains, in a process devised by the composer to obtain a melody from an image by means of a graphic chart. The Symphony No. 7 is scored for a huge orchestra and is one of the composer’s most ambitious and significant statements. Both works represent the composer’s powerful desire to invent a specifically Brazilian idiom.

By the 1940s Heitor Villa-Lobos was widely recognised as Latin America’s greatest composer. Working in the United States gave him new perspectives, and his later symphonies move away from the folk influences and exotic effects of works written in the 1920s and 30s, such as the Bachianas Brasileiras, towards more concise, sometimes neo-Classical models. The Eighth and Ninth share a transparent lightness of touch while the Eleventh, described as a work of ‘immediate charm’, is the perfect introduction to the later work of Villa-Lobos.

Heitor Villa-Lobos was instrumental in developing a national Brazilian musical culture, writing in a wide variety of forms. Composed in 1954 for the 400th anniversary of the founding of São Paulo, Ameríndia is the composer’s largest symphony. Effectively a hybrid symphony and oratorio for soloists, chorus and orchestra, it is memorable for its stylistic variety and breadth, drawing on many different sources of Brazilian music. This recording is based on a newly revised edition made by Editora Criadores do Brasil (the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra’s publishing house) in collaboration with the Academia Brasileira de Música.

Villa-Lobos’s Symphony No. 12, his last, was completed on his 70th birthday and shows no lessening of his powers, marrying symphonic craftsmanship with explosive energy, harmonic richness, and rhythmic vitality; a fitting summation of his symphonic canon. Uirapuru is one of his most original works, couched in a modernism that teems with colour and creates a specifically Brazilian sound world without drawing on folkloric elements, whilst Mandu-Çarará is a notably inventive, lush, and exciting but little-known secular cantata.