TRIBUTE TO VILLA-LOBOS, performed by the Brazilian pianist José Eduardo Martins, is the first recording in the series and features works by the great Brazilian master and by a group of composers from Brazil, Portugal, Austria, Spain and Cuba via the United States. Like Villa-Lobos himself, these works cover a diverse range of styles, popular and experimental, that evoke the spirit of their distinguished predecessor and allow the older works to be heard in a new way.
PRESS RELEASE
José Eduardo Martins: piano
works by Villa-Lobos, Ficarelli, Mendes, and others
José Eduardo Martins performs Villa-Lobos masterpieces together with works written in homage to the Brazilian master.
The great Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos was perhaps the most colorful and prolific of twentieth-century musical creators. Now Labor Records and the Brazilian pianist José Eduardo Martins have released a Music of Tribute album dedicated to him and consisting of some of his own major works for piano and tributes to him by younger composers.
Villa-Lobos himself is represented by two of his Cirandas ("Round Dances"), a set of pieces which recreate, with authentic melodic and rhythmic content, themes taken from Brazilian nursery rhymes. Chôro No 5, subtitled Alma Brasileira or "Brazilian Soul," is one of the composer's best-known scores for piano and combines elements from the three traditions that formed modern Brazil: Indian, European and Afro-Brazilian. The four character pieces that make up the colorful and virtuosic Ciclo Brasileiro or "Brailizian Cycle" are Plantio do Caboclo, Impressões Seresteira, Festa no Sertão and Dança do India Branca; these titles are difficult to translate but their sense might be rendered as Pioneer or Settler's Song, Strolling Minstrels, Hoedown in the Sagebrush and Dance of the White Indian.
A number of years ago, Martins invited a number of composers to write works in homage to Villa-Lobos. Several fellow Brazilians – including Almeida Prado, Gilberto Mendes and Mario Ficarelli – were joined by the Cuban-American, Aurelio de La Vega, the Portuguese Jorge Peixinho, Wilhelm Zobl from Austria and others. Martins presented the premiere of these pieces, an earlier tribute by Villa-Lobos' younger contemporary, Camargo Guarnieri, and some of Villa-Lobos' own music as part of the celebrations in commemoration of the centennial of the composer's birth in 1987. This concert has now become the basis of the new Labor Records release.
Like Villa-Lobos' own works, these tributes cover a wide range of styles from minimalist to serial and post-serial. In effect, these tributes pick up where the master himself left off and this interaction of new and old – part confrontation, part reinterpretation – sets off the familiar sounds of these older, almost classical works, giving them an entirely fresh context. The old and the new are juxtaposed so that they illuminate each other and this is the fundamental idea behind the Labor series of tribute albums.
TRACK LISTING
Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959)
Two Cirandas
1. N'esta rua, n'esta rua…
(In this Street, in this Street…)
2. Passa, passa, gaviâo
(Go, Go, Hawk)
Mario Ficarelli (1935)
3. Minimal Ciranda
Gilberto Mendes (1922)
4. Villa-Villa
Villa Lobos
5. Choros No. 5 - Alma Brasileira
Choros No. 5 - Brazilian Soul)
Camargo Guarnieri (1907-1993)
6.Improviso No. 2 (Homenagem a Villa-Lobos)
Almeida Prado (1943)
7. Noturnas Saudades do Rio Solimôes
(Nostalgic Nocturnes of the Amazon)
Wilhelm Zobl
8. Ária Brasileira
(Bachianas Européias No. 1)
Villa-Lobos
Ciclo Brasileiro
9. Plantio do Caboclo
(Settler's Song)
10. Impressôes Seresteiras
(Strolling Minstrels)
11. Festa no Sertâo
(Hoedown in the Sagebrush)
12. Dança do Indio branco
(Dance of the White Indian)
Jorge Peixinho (1940-1995)
13. Villalbarosa (Homenagem a Villa-Lobos)
Aurélio de la Vega (1925)
14. Homenagem
REVIEW / Gramophone (The Classical Music Magazine)
Live performances generally fare best when they offer a variety of composers mingling like guests at a party with the performer serving as host. Recordings, by contrast, benefit most from focusing on a single composer, if only for the sake of cataloguing. A skilful mediation of those two approaches comes in this initial offering from Labor Records' projected Music of Tribute series.
During the Villa-Lobos centennial in 1987, the Brazilian pianist and scholar José Eduardo Martins (brother of João Carlos - see his recordings of Bach's keyboard works) invited 10 mainly Brazilian composers to contribute short pieces in his honour. Like Walt Whitman, Villa-Lobos was large and contained multitudes. In confronting his outsized legacy these composers' range of responses are as diverse as the subject himself. The most direct response comes in Camargo Guarnieri's "Improviso" No. 2, which predates the centennial project, having been written in 1960 soon after Villa-Lobos's death. Guarnieri (1907-93), a near-contemporary of Villa-Lobos and a fellow nationalist composer, takes the opening of Villa-Lobos's "Choros" No. 5, 'Alma Brasileira', as a point of departure. Guarnieri's student, Almeida Prado (b.1943), by contrast, uses Villa-Lobos's lyricism to more mystical ends. Rhythm becomes the focus for Gilberto Mendes's "Viva-Villa!", and Mario Ficarelli's "Minimal Ciranda," the latter pointing to the repetition-heavy Villa-Lobos as a proto-minimalist.
More modernist claims on the composer come from Europe, with Austrian composer Wilhelm Zobl's 'Aria Brasileira' ("Bachianas Europeias" No.1) and Portuguese composer Jorge Peixinho's "Villabarosa", both of whom seem to extend the nationalist modernism of Villa-Lobos's "Ciclo brasileiro," just as that cycle seems to extend Debussy and Ravel.
By sprinkling these pieces among a handful of pertinent Villa-Lobos works, Martins deftly sets up both the composer's initial statements and their echoes in a way that imposes a fluid structural coherence. It not only captures the subject, but gives him room to breathe.
- Ken Smith / Gramaphone (The Classical Music Magazine)
REVIEW / musicweb UK
This is a delightful, thought-provoking CD, based on an excellent concept. In 1987, one hundred years after the birth of Villa-Lobos, the pianist and musicologist José Eduardo Martins invited a number of composers to write tributes in his honour. This CD contains some of the music written in response to that invitation by a number of Villa-Lobos’s fellow Brazilians (Ficarelli, Mendes and Prado), and by composers from Austria (Zobl), the U.S.A. (De La Vega) and Portugal (Peixinho). An earlier homage by Camargo Guarnieri is also included. The spine, as it were, of the CD is provided by piano music by Villa-Lobos himself.
The idea was a good one and it has been well-executed. Martins understands this music very well and performs it with affection and sympathy. The recorded piano sound is pretty good. The programme on the CD has been intelligently arranged, so that light is shone on Villa-Lobos by his admirers and vice-versa.
The programme begins with two of Villa-Lobos’s set of sixteen cirandas, pieces based on materials from Brazilian nursery rhymes or playground songs in the form of rounds. The idiom thus established, it encounters a kind of staccato minimalism in Mario Ficarelli’s Minimal Ciranda which immediately succeeds them, the recurrent patterns which open the piece giving way to a charming ciranda-like melody and then returning to close the piece. An attractive vignette. A certain indebtedness to minimalism is perhaps also evident in the repeated figures of Mendes’ Viva-Villa, though it is a minimalism with more than a few echoes of Chick Corea or Keith Jarrett!
A second phase of the CD begins with Choros No. 5, Villa-Lobos well-known image of the ‘Brazilian soul’. Camargo Giuarnieri’s Homenagem was written soon after the death of Villa-Lobos. Although, like Choros No. 5, it evokes distinctly Brazilian rhythms, there is also something decidedly French about many of its harmonies and its pianistic effects – perhaps a recognition of the importance of Milhaud in particular, and early twentieth-century French music in general, as influences on the music of Villa-Lobos. Almeida Prado studied with Guarnieri – and with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen – and his beautiful piece, in effect a nocturne, is reminiscent both of French impressionism and of some of Villa-Lobos’ more quietly lyrical pieces. In the wittily entitled tribute by Wilhelm Zobl (of which Gilberto Mendes is one of the dedicatees) use is made of the aria from the second movement of Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5, which is placed above an ostinato in eighth-notes and gradually metamorphosed in a number of ways.
The final phase of the CD begins with a fine performance of the Ciclo Brasileiro , technically assured and affectionate; Ciclo Brasileiro’s four movements show much of Villa-Lobos characteristic eclecticism, in which rural dance rhythms from Brazil encounter Ravel and Debussy. This sequence stands at the heart of the CD, the point of reference for all that surrounds it.
Peixinho’s Villalbarosa extends Villa-Lobos’ modernism in ways that are more distinctly European and partially informed by musical idioms that belong to the decade after Villa-Lobos’ death. Lavish in glissandos and note-clusters it is a melodramatic piece – and I am not sure that Villa-Lobos would have liked it very much! De La Vega’s Homenagem, which closes the programme, inventively synthesises elements from Latin American music with some echoes of blues and jazz and some ‘classical’ features. The whole works rather better than such a rich mixture might suggest!
The spirit of the whole programme, the often witty musical cross-references, the avoidance of over rigid classifications and boundaries, is one that is entirely apt for Villa-Lobos. It is a fitting tribute and makes fascinating listening.
Glyn Pursglove / musicweb UK
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