Will the Villa-Lobos Survive?

Thoughts on the spectacularly intense piano music of Heitor Villa-Lobos

With waves of new music flooding the Internet daily, it is probably not surprising that the work of so-called “legacy” artists and long-dead luminaries is often reduced to career-essentializing shorthand. As in: Pachelbel, the guy with the canon. R.E.M., the indie-rockers who gave the world “Losing My Religion.” And so on.

But as anyone who’s even casually explored the rich R.E.M. catalog will attest, the big hit is rarely the whole story. And this taxonomic act – reducing years and decades of significant creative work to one signal achievement, the lead sentence in the Wiki entry – can itself limit exploration. We like to classify things in tidy boxes; once we know where to put something, it becomes “known,” and possibly fixed in the brain’s filing cabinet.

I’ve been thinking about this while delving into the fervent, fitful music Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos wrote for piano in the early 20th century. By far the best known Villa Lobos pieces are the Bachianas Brazileiros, which cleverly connect surging and quintessentially lyrical Brazilian melodies to the clockwork structures of Bach.

The suites, written for various combinations of instruments, are the Villa-Lobos “hit” songs, and that’s deserved: They’re brainy and gorgeous at the same time. But they do not offer a complete picture of the work of Villa-Lobos; by design, they’re relatively sedate.

They don’t necessarily prepare you for his fire, his impulsiveness, his conceptual ingenuity, his childlike spirit. To explore a bit of the range of this prolific composer, who created some 200 works just for piano and nearly 2000 overall, I sought out recordings from pianists who have devoted significant energy to his scores. My first encounter was through Marc-Andre Hamelin’s astounding 1999 recording Villa-Lobos Piano Music; his poise and technical command brings sharp clarity to the challenging material. (Just how challenging is this stuff? Cue up this or any of the YouTube versions with the score displayed on the screen….that’ll tell you.)

More recently I’ve been captivated by the Piano Music series Sonia Rubinsky has done for Naxos. Spread over 8 individual discs, this project surveys the primary Villa-Lobos piano works, including several of the child’s-playroom suites like A Prole do Babe and the dense Rudepoema, which was written for pianist (and Villa-Lobos champion) Artur Rubinstein in the 1920s.

Rubinsky clearly “gets” Villa-Lobos; she renders the dense Rudepoema with great precision, helping the ear to follow its intersecting and overlapping melody lines. Elsewhere, on some of the fever-dream miniatures, her phrasing has the snap of the pre-samba parade bands the composer might have heard on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Observing the steady beat of the Choro and other dance forms Villa-Lobos explored, she conjures the liveliness and animation of the styles while toying with and slyly stretching their cadences.

Hamelin and Rubinsky are more than killer technicians. They’re clearly inspired by Villa-Lobos’ mission as a composer, which involved assimilating folk music and the popular music of his day into works that are singularly his own creations. Yes many of these pieces celebrate the vitality of Brazil – its art, its people, its natural beauty – but not as tourism pastiche. They’re filtered through Villa-Lobos’ endlessly refracting lens.

And what a character Villa-Lobos was. Largely self-taught on guitar and then piano, he began his career in his teen years, playing in cinemas and theaters after his father died suddenly, In 1905 he left Rio, his hometown, to explore what he termed the “dark interior” of Brazil. Accounts of these extended multi-year journeys vary – some Brazilian scholars suggest that Villa-Lobos embellished his tales of skirmishes with cannibals and Amazon tribes – but he returned with a deep understanding of his country’s rhythms and folklore. This provided the foundation for his mature composition style, evident on such early works as Carnaval das crianças, written between 1919 and 1920.

Villa-Lobos was embraced by some in the classical music establishment, and in 1923 made the first of several extended trips to Paris, where he encountered such modernists as Darius Milhaud and Pablo Picasso. This raised Villa-Lobos’ profile internationally, and he began to land unconventional commissions: His piece New York Skyline derives some melodic elements from a photograph of New York superimposed on blank score paper. At the urging of composer Edgar Varese, he used a similar trick for the suite As Tres Marias, this time focusing on the stars in the constellation Orion. It’s a work of breathtaking originality, but Hamelin avoids glorifying the novelty aspects, emphasizing the sweeping, incredibly animated themes over the knotty conceptual aspects of the score.

As with many artists who produce lots and lots of output, there are some clunkers in the Villa-Lobos catalog. The inspired pieces, though, are momentous. They have the feeling of a language just beginning to coalesce — with swirling street dance forms bumping into provocative higher-math polyrhythm, and the wisdom of the ancient (and, alas, then-vibrant) Amazon crashing headfirst into the gleaming prospect of modernity.

Below, a few other interesting Villa-Lobos encounters:

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