Heitor Villa-Lobos - String Quartet No. 15 (1954)

Heitor Villa-Lobos (March 5, 1887 - November 17, 1959) was a Brazilian composer, described as "the single most significant creative figure in 20th-century Brazilian art music". Villa-Lobos has become the best-known South American composer of all time. A prolific composer, he wrote numerous orchestral, chamber, instrumental and vocal works, totaling over 2000 works by his death in 1959. His music was influenced by both Brazilian folk music and by stylistic elements from the European classical tradition, as exemplified by his Bachianas Brasileiras (Brazilian Bachian-pieces). His Etudes for guitar (1929) were dedicated to Andrés Segovia, while his 5 Preludes (1940) were dedicated to Arminda Neves d’Almeida, a.k.a. "Mindinha." Both are important works in the guitar repertory.
String Quartet No. 15 (1954) New York
Dedicated to the New Music Quartet
1. Allegro non troppo
2. Moderato (5:56)
3. Scherzo (Vivace) (12:28)
4. Allegro (14:22)
Cuarteto Latinoamericano, Mexico City
Saúl Bitrán, Arón Bitrán, violins; Javier Montiel, viola; Alvaro Bitrán, cello
Recorded at the Sala Nezahualcóyotl in Mexico City, September 1996. Music of Latin American Masters. Dorian DOR-90246. Troy, NY: Dorian Recordings, 1997.
Description by Seth Brodsky [-]
There are, to paraphrase Friedrich Nietzsche, some geniuses who want only to beget and others who want to be fructified and to give birth; the former masters her ideas, instrumentalizes and actualizes them while the latter gives in to them, as if she were a mere channeler holding séances for her own imagination. In this albeit partial perspective, Heitor Villa-Lobos is definitely the latter type of artist -- a joyous supplicant to the untiring fecundity of his own ideas. This can be heard in many works, but especially in some of the "late works," like the String Quartet No. 15 from 1954, written just four years before the composer's death. From its rapt beginning illuminated by string harmonics, yawning registral gaps, and a stunningly simple undulating pattern in 4/2, the score declares itself the happy victim of one inspiration after another. The composer, always a confident writer, seems to re-inaugurate that confidence here, effortlessly traveling from one delightful sonic vista to another. In other composers, this might not work at all, and there are other quartets of Villa-Lobos that don't have the conviction of this one. After all, "bad" composition is, to some extent, synonymous with avoiding development and giving oneself over to the easy beauty of the moment. But the beauty of the moment isn't as easy as its detractors would imagine, and when it is applied as consistently as Villa-Lobos -- changing texture and pattern almost every four bars like a four-voice film montage -- it tends to attain its own unifying gravity and almost becomes a kind of mastering method. Imagine a kaleidoscope, shifting its lovely patterns with an apparent whimsy that is later revealed to be a carefully calculated slight of hand.
The opening movement eventually trades its lucid, mobile-like beginnings for a more chromatic middle section full of the composer's vagaroso writing, rhapsodic and cyclic in its snaking lyricism. The coda, often one of the most exciting sections in a Villa-Lobos quartet, does not disappoint here: rather than providing a summary, it willfully violates rhetorical expectations and leaves the rest of the movement behind; its erupting volley of repeated sixteenth notes is perhaps nodding to Villa-Lobos' distant contemporary Dmitri Shostakovich. The following slow movement is one of the greatest in all the composer's quartets, the true heart of fructified invention; its ideas, each magically evocative and texturally fragile, arise with strange determination, as if planted on a slowly rotating wheel.

[@ricardoaigner169]

What a masterpiece! And a marvelous rendition!

[@zemoderno]

This is a masterpiece.

[@davidlopes4246]

Incrível!

[@dianaamandastynen.883]

That ''Poco allegro'' what a wonderfull thing.

[@Cayres18]

Um salve do Brasilll

[@COYS-xy5wc]

好きです/好聽/好听/듣기좋아요

[@aramkhachaturian8043]

i see japanese hiragana and korean characters at the same time nani

[@kniazigor2276]

Très beau quatuor magnifiquement interprété par le quarteto latinoamericano

[@Cayres18]

Você tem público brasileirooo

[@yuehchopin]

gut