February 2012
1 post
January 2012
6 posts
WatchAn excellent version of Villa-Lobos’s 4th Prelude, by Katrina Leshan.
“He was in the Brazilian jungle with a friend and guide.
“There is a...”
– A great story from Ralph Gustafson’s hugely entertaining memoir “Villa-Lobos and the Man-Eating Flower,” The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 1 (Spring, 1991),p. 5.
December 2011
1 post
November 2011
7 posts
“In Paris he acquired all the technical and aesthetic means of expression...”
– Vasco Mariz, p. 30
“As Varese once remarked to his wife, ‘Well, when you meet him you look...”
– From Edgard Varese: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary, ed. Felix Meyer & Heidy Zimmermann, 2006. Not a very nice thing for Edgard Varese to say about his Brazilian friend. Mme. Varese certainly gave his comment the best possible interpretation. I wonder if she often ‘translated’...
October 2011
2 posts
“Poulenc, with his Rapsodie nègre [1917, rev. 1933]; Milhaud, with his L’homme et...”
– Alejo Carpentier, quoted in Katia Chornik’s 2010 Doctoral Thesis “The Role of Music in Selected Novels and Associated Writings of Alejo Carpentier: Primeval Expression, Structural Analogies and Performance”, The Open University.
September 2011
9 posts
“He can compose in the midst of pandemonium. He proved it to me by composing...”
– Nicolas Slonimsky, “Heitor Villa-Lobos: A Visit”, Musical America, Oct. 10, 1941
“The Nonetto I call ‘a musical Guernica, but with humor…’”
– Ricardo Rocha, from “Maestro Rocha on Heitor Villa-Lobos”, 2009.
“One day, at the home of Prokofieff, he met Diaghilev, who was impressed by his...”
– Vasco Mariz, p. 19
“Art is a mystery. The more we approach the mystery of art, the more it moves...”
– Villa-Lobos, in a lecture at Radio Gazeta, on September 30, 1957. From a story by Isa Leal from Presença de Villa-Lobos.
August 2011
6 posts
“This marriage of Villa-Lobos to folklore is so perfect, so far reaching and...”
– Abel Carlevaro, Guitar Masterclass vol 2, 1987, p. 4
“When Cendrars visited Brazil in 1924, his excursion into Minas Gerais...”
– K. David Jackson, “Literature of the Sao Paulo Week of Modern Art”, Pre-publication working papers of the of Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas at Austin, Paper No. 87-08, p. 3. Villa-Lobos’s connections with new trends in Modernism happened not only in his...
“…[Edu] Lobo questions what he sees as an excessive emphasis on jazz as a...”
– Imagining Brazil, by Jessz Souza, Valter Sinder, p.259.
July 2011
10 posts
Cristina Ortiz brings Norwegian audience to tears... →
This story from Estadão radio talks about a concert by Cristina Ortiz in Oslo on the weekend of the attacks. The Brazilian ambassador to Norway, Carlos Henrique Cardim, is interviewed.
“Il serait naïf de s’arrêter devant l’élucubration vacarmophonique de...”
– A zinger from a critic, in a notice in Le Ménestrel, June 24, 1931. Google Translation:
It would be naive to stop at Mr. Villa-Lobos’s vacarmophonic digression, and thus have the air of taking it seriously. It is probably a joke shop where he was the first to laugh … do the same and...
WatchNo Villa-Lobos content here. I posted this great song by Jack Teagarden because I just love it so much. What a great song by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn.
New theses
A new thesis by Jolie Suhshiow Lin, “Heitor Villa-Lobos’s A prole do bebê, no. 1 and Alberto Ginastera’s Doce preludios Americanos, op. 12 : the modernists’ search for cultural expression and nationalistic sentiment,” Peabody Institute, 2011.
And another:
Maria J Farinha, “The eternal and the poetic in re-creating Brazilian music : the mutual...
“In July 1948 at age 61, he underwent resection of the urinary bladder for...”
– What Killed the Great and Not So Great Composers?, Joseph W. Lewis, Jr., MD
June 2011
5 posts
“We had a parade of visitors all the time, Frank Sinatra, Danny Kaye, Doris Day,...”
– Conductor Leonard Slatkin remembers his Hollywood childhood, in a Guardian profile, “Star-spangled Promenader.” Boy, I’d love to hear that tape!
“Villa-Lobos is just 35 years old, and his production reveals a musician of...”
– Wow! Villa must have been pleased when he read this report in a Buenos Aires paper: (La Quena, ano VI, No 24, June-July 1925, p.3-7).
“… And this is the weird and bizarre Villa-Lobos: because all art is...”
– Review in La Prensa of a performance of Choros #02 in Buenos Aires, 1925. From Mansilla, S. L. “Heitor Villa-Lobos en Buenos Aires durante la década de 1920”, Per Musi, Belo Horizonte, n.16, 2007, p. 42-53
“Like Varese, Carpentier was a regular visitor to Villa-Lobos’s flat at the...”
– The Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier was one of the first critics to understand the greatness of Villa-Lobos. They met in Paris in 1929. This quote is from Caroline Rae’s article “In Havana and Paris: the musical activities of Alejo Carpentier,” Music & Letters, v89n3, 2008, p....
May 2011
5 posts
“Villa-Lobos gave birth to the modern guitar, forging a new path for it; the...”
– Abel Carlevaro, 1987, “Technique, Analysis and Interpretation of Villa-Lobos: 12 Studies.”
