My wake up and smell the coffee album
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
…. Heitor Villa-Lobos, Brazil’s national composer, feted worldwide from the 1930s to the 1950s, has long since faded. His music always sounds fresh when I return to it after an absence, glistening with the swaying hips of a summer’s night on the Copacabana….
Read on here.
And here.
En francais ici.
Another remedy for missing the Copacabana is Milhaud’s Saudades do Brasil.
I spent some time in Brazil, from north to south. Music everywhere — as in Cuba. They are probably the most musically obsessed nations of earth. And it has produced very good composers in every genre — if I hear something Brazilian is on offer, I’m there (or was, back when there were concerts all over the place).
Villa-Lobos is the master, but do give some of his countrymen a listen. Nepomuceno, Gomes — and don’t forget the popular stuff.
Much as we may appreciate the photo, why is it there?
What’s with the colour picture? The gentleman seems rather, umm, interested in the lady.
What a cover (or lack of it)!
One local: Francisco Mignone, Congada (orchestral version). incidentally he wrote a number of operas and can’t think of a recording of any.
One foreigner: Respighi, Canzone e Danza (Brazilian Impressions.
The picture shows what happens to you when you listen too much to Villa-Lobos. Be warned.
Here is the music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiZaCXHeow8
To be listened to with the airco on.
Another vote for music of Brazilian composers Francesco Mignone and the marvelously named Radames Gnattali, who had a sister named Aida. Marc-Andre Hamelin plays their piano music. Among foreigners is Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s immortal “Grand Phantasia on the Brazilian National Hymn” that Guiomar Novaes played in her recitals. The thought of it is to be avoided on long railway journeys.
Any music by Villa-Lobos strikes me as being very musical, very expressive, but uncooked – quickly thrown on paper and not given much thought. Hence the easy eclecticism. If he had written only one-third of his music but then worked it through more carefully, it could have been much better.
There is suppressed information that Messiaen was strongly influenced by the exotic touch of Villa-Lobos in the twenties and thirties, and tried to outdo him in his Turangulila. But since V-L’s reputation sank very quickly among the new music incrowd in the fourties and fifties, he removed his traces as much as possible. But there is much V-L in Messiaen.