Villa

Choral music holds a central position in Villa-Lobos’s catalogue of works, but among these famous pieces is a series of little-known transcriptions for a cappella choir taken from the standard classical repertoire. They were intended for a teachers’ chorus and for use in schools, and through astonishing alchemy they achieve a true ‘orchestration’ of largely piano originals, adding a fresh new repertoire for vocal ensembles. This album also includes the first ever recording of Villa-Lobos’s complete set of a cappella transcriptions from Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier.

Heitor Villa-Lobos was a key figure in twentieth- century Brazilian music, an instinctive creator with a luxuriant imagination, at once provocative and conformist. He forged a personal style by founding his idiom on the melodic and rhythmic traditions of his country and enriching it with all the innovations he found among his contemporaries. His protean music captivates the listener with the diversity of its aesthetic orientations, which exalt his ardent patriotism and find expression in vast epic scores or, on the contrary, in delicious, piquant miniatures.

HEITOR VILLA-LOBOS, born in Rio de Janeiro in 1887, has, by virtue of both his immense output and colourful and accessible musical language, become the most celebrated Brazilian composer of all time. His work not only richly typifies the diverse and kaleidoscopic Brazilian scene but also, in its abundance, originality, and vitality, provided the key which unlocked Brazilian art music once and for all from the shackles of European late-Romanticism..

Ensemble Villa Musica - Portrait
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 213 MB | Full Artwork: 144 MB | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: MDG # P 3491 | Country/Year: Germany 1993
Genre: Classical | Style: Artist Portrait, Chamber Music, Contemporary

The Ensemble Villa Musica has established an outstanding reputation for itself in the music world. Its members number among the leading instrumentalists currently active in Germany. Today these former concertmasters and principal soloists of great orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic and Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra devote their time and effort exclusively to solo and chamber performance…

Two Brazilian artists pay tribute to Villa-Lobos and the Amazon rainforest… Sebastião Salgado is a world-renowned photographer who has been working since the 1990s to protect and restore the Atlantic forest and water resources of the Rio Doce valley in Brazil. The Italian-Brazilian conductor Simone Menezes is passionate about the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos and his symphonic poem Floresta do Amazonas, for which she created a suite for large orchestra and soprano. Together they travel the world to present an exhibition of Salgado's photographs, combined with concerts conducted by Simone in which the photographs are projected, the photographer having associated each musical phrase with one of his images… The music of this monumental project has been recorded with the Philharmonia Zürich and soprano Camila Provenzale. Ten photos by Salgado, each more striking than the last, are included in the booklet that accompanies this recording, which is completed by another tribute to Amazonian nature, by Philip Glass, with an extract from his Aguas da Amazonia.