VILLA-LOBOS • THE COMPLETE WORKS FOR SOLO GUITAR
For four hundred years Brazil suffered the problem of colonialized imagination, where local talent has difficulty in expressing itself. The artistic production was not nourished by direct experience and natural environment, remaining dependent on alien values imported from Portugal until 1889, when it became a republic. It was the role of the generation of artists who came to prominence in the 1900s to develop a national artistic conscience, and Heitor VillaLobos (1897-1959) was the most universally acclaimed of them. He was born in Rio de Janeiro, the son of an intellectual who taught him to play the cello. After his death the young Heitor learned to play the guitar, an instrument associated with the lower ranks of society. In 1906 he embarked on a legendary trip to the North of his country; he travelled across the coast as far as Manaus, in the Amazon, meeting the humble people and intuitively absorbing their habits and rich musical folklore; later in his life he would exaggerate facts from this trip, inspired by the scientific expeditions that were taking place at the same time. Back to Rio in 1910, he married a pianist and tried (unsuccessfully) to catch up with his musical education as a "serious" composer, while
working as a free-lance musician, playing at the opera house at night and in cafes during the day. His earliest known guitar works, which now comprise the "Suite Populaire Bresilienne", belong to this period. At the time of Villa-Lobos' youth Brazil still was in the process of assimilating the foreign influences that would result in its rich popular music. Until that time, entertainment music consisted of imported European dances: waltzes, polkas, mazurkas, schottisches, and there was no distinction between a popular and a schooled composer. In 1888 slavery was abolished and the interaction of musicians of different classes increased. This is the time when two genres, the "choro" and the "seresta" (serenade), are developed, and when the gap between "classical" and "popular" music is established. Musicologists dispute over the origin of the word choro (Portuguese for weeping); some think of it as a corruption of the word "chorus" as a designation for instrumental group, others affirm that "xolo" is an African word for dance. Still today, choro musicians employ the expression "to weep on the trebles" or "to weep on the bass", underlining its sentimentality. Initially the name was given 4
to the instrumental groups that played this hybrid music; later, it was applied to the music itself. From the beginning, choro was an instrumental genre, characterized by the presence of a soloist (generally a flute or clarinet), a rhythmical continuo (marked by a cavaquinho or soprano guitar) and a restless bass line (usually two guitars); the level of technical accomplishment was high. This genre was dominant in the urban centres for fifty years, giving way to the mass appeal of the "samba" in the 1930s; nowadays it is seen by the great public as something of the past, but it is still cultivated by a great number of initiates. According to Donga, one of the major choro personalities, VillaLobos was a virtuoso "both as a soloist and as accompanist, a great, great improviser; a mediocre player was not allowed to those circles". The five pieces of the "Suite" give us a sample of what Villa-Lobos might have been as a choro soloist. Although full of compositional inconsistencies, they already display the composer's talent to be at once personal (notice the parellelism and "wrongnote" chords in the mazurka and schottisch), Brazilian (the descending melodic lines and short-length syncopation are indelible national fingerprints) and international (the chromaticism of the waltz is clearly derived from the piano repertoire).
Chorinho is an elusive, mischievous piece, full of opportunities for sneaky rubato. I borrowed four introductory bars to the Mazurka from a manuscript version called Simples, dated 1911 and dedicated to a guitar pupil with the inscription: "this piece is to be taken only as a study; I don't consider it as serious music at all" (!). These five pieces were put together for publication when Villa-Lobos was already an international celebrity and the title was chosen against his will. They are hardly suitable for concert performance; since serenades are, disgracefully, rarer these days. it is on disc that they can be best enjoyed. The mentor of the Modernist movement in Brazil was Mario de Andrade, one of the most important writers of Portuguese language, who was also a music teacher and ethnomusicologist. He felt that the artistic production of Brazil had to create its own methods of evaluation, instead of measuring itself up against unsuitable European models. His ideal of a characteristic Brazilian musical language would result from a sublimation of diverse folkloric essential traits, roughly alongside the Bartokian model of the third stage of nationalism, in which the composer is so deeply immersed in the folkloric culture that he creates original themes that retain the t f 5
national flavour, without having to quote directly from folklore. The major problem was, for him, to find formal procedures that were at once intellectually satisfying and representative of the inordinate profusion of the Brazilian character. In spite of the lovehate relationship between Andrade and Villa-Lobos, it was in the latter's production of the twenties that the ideals of Modernism were realized most impressively -- the phase of the Choros and the 12 Etudes. The gigantic series of 14 Choros is his magnum opus. Written for combinations that range from the solo guitar to the large orchestra and choir, its ambition was to create a comprehensive geographic panorama of all musical currents of the Brazilian folklore.
Choros no. 1 (he always kept the title in the plural) is dedicated to Ernesto Nazareth, the greatest popular piano composer of this period. It is intentionally written in the style of the original choro to serve as a point of departure; the themes are original but inspired in the melodic and rhythmical traits of popular composers like Nazareth, Bilhar or Gonzaga. It is important to notice that this is essentially urbane music: it is unambiguously tonal, and its modulations follow the traditional cycle of fifths. The focus of interest is the gesture, punctuated by unexpected melodic leaps and charming pauses.
Villa-Lobos was already in his thirties when he was "discovered" by the pianist Artur Rubinstein, then a frequent visitor to South America. He added many of the Brazilian's pieces to his repertoire and prepared the ground for his first trip to Europe. Sponsored by magnates, Villa-Lobos lived in Paris from 1923 to 1930, where, through his natural charisma, he became one of the most respected composers, a friend of the major artists of the time and a darling of the press. Encouraged by the good reception to his exoticism, he felt liberated from the petitbourgeois taste that had informed his earlier work and created an enormous number of experimental pieces. Around 1929, at one stroke he revolutionized the history of the guitar with the composition of the Twelve Studies. The guitar still had a dubious reputation in the 1920s, a situation that was progressively being reversed by the success of Andres Segovia. He became acquainted with Villa-Lobos in Paris and asked him to write a study for the guitar; he could never imagine that such a torrent of wild and idiosyncratic ideas would spring from his pen. Essentially a romantic virtuoso, Segovia loathed the pieces and, in a letter to Ponce, he dismissed Villa-Lobos as incompetent, which didn't prevent him to write a laudatory preface, a gem of duplicity, when they were published in 1953. Still, Segovia premiered. 6
Studies nos. 1, 7 and 8 in 1947, but a complete performance only took place as late as 1963 by Turibio Santos, proof of the work's forward-looking nature. The published version seems to be based on an early draft, but the publishers retain a later, fair copy of the cycle, containing careful dynamic marks and fingerings and many discrepancies in the text, which I use for this recording, thanks to a copy kindly forwarded by the Villa-Lobos Museum in Rio.
With these studies Villa-Lobos was the first composer to let the musical material emanate from the instrument's fingerboard. This can be noticed already in the first study, a unique double-layered arpeggio pattern reminiscent of Bach and of Chopin's Study no. 1. The arpeggio idea is expanded in the fiendishly difficult no. 2, a very classical study written in the style of Carcassi or Aguado. No. 3 is a slur study (the manuscript doesn't bring the erroneous title etude des arpeges which introduces a harmonic material of French flavour and major-minor ambiguity, with extensive use of the chord of added sixth. No. 4 is a study of repeated chords, an obvious technical formula, although one can also read it as an extension of the riffs played by the "repentistas", minstrels from the Brazilian hinterlands; the nostalgia of the main theme
is largely due to the lowered seventh degree, typical of the music of that area. Here VillaLobos exploits his trademark of employing a fixed finger pattern placed in various positions of the fingerboard - the resulting parallelism is unbearable in other composer's hands, but Villa-Lobos handles the dialogue with the open strings so cunningly that a whole prism of different harmonic functions is created by these patterns. No. 5 is an ostinato study that perfectly fits Andrade's model: polyphony and a rich bass line create a unique, selfcontained structure, and the modal main theme could be easily identified as a Brazilian children's round, notwithstanding the fact that it is an original creation. Control of dynamics is the subject of no. 6, whose "geographical" approach to the fingerboard is perhaps better conveyed in a live performance, while no. 7 is a virtuoso study of scales, interrupted by a wide, generous sustained melody of Franckian inspiration over a embolada-like accompaniment (embolada is another Brazilian dance genre). No. 8 is a melancholy toada (song), enriched by chromaticism and altered chords of impressionistic flavour, while no. 9 has in its descending parallel movement a reminiscence of the Portuguese facto. The last three studies form a group of deliberatley primitive pieces and constitute
7
one of the major achievements in guitar writing of the century. No. 10 is the most rhythmically complex of the whole cycle; the manuscript version contains 33 unpublished bars, which round the piece off in a more satisfactory form and relate it to the profusion of ornament of the great works of this period, Choros no. 10 and Rudepoema. The difficult slur section is built over a ground bass, which is, simultaneously, a version of the slur pattern in longer values and a reference to Indian melodies heard by Villa-Lobos on recordings of an anthropological expedition. Study no. 11 displays a multiplicity of references in a ballade-like, rhetorically narrative style; in it we can hear the syncopated rhythm of Northeastern accent, and, in the central section, the remarkable technical idea of having six notes E played on different strings at the same time, evoking the tuning of the viola caipira (a Brazilian rustic guitar).
Study no. 12 ends the cycle in an apotheosis of bruitism; the parallel glissando movement hardly suggests any tonal centre and in the central section the guitar is treated almost like a drum. Villalobos' primitivism is not a defense of aesthetic points of view; he is a primitive when the narrative necessities so require. His often quoted phrase, "the folklore is me", has a grain of truth: his major achievements are not reached.
through a rational mental process; rather, they are fruit of a remarkable intuition, akin to the popular creativity.
In 1930 Villa-Lobos returned to Brazil never to live abroad again. He became a worshipped national celebrity and assumed the role of music educator for the masses, supported by the dictator Getulio Vargas. He tamed the beasts of his earlier production and evolved a new style tangential to European neo-classicism. The series of nine Bachianas Brasileiras and the Five Preludes are the best known works of this period. Prelude no.1 portrays the sertanejo, the peasant of the backlands and his solitude in the country's vastness. Its heroic melody is one of Villa-Lobos' melodic glories of this period, deservedly popular. No. 2 returns to the carefree atmosphere of the choro, in an hommage to the carioca (Rio-born) tramp; the middle section suggests the sound of the berimbau (a percussion instrument). Prelude no. 3 is a homage to Bach, Villa-Lobos' idol of this period, whom he regarded as international folklore; indeed the melodic idea of the second half is both a quotation of Bach's Toccata and fugue in D minor and a typical serenade-like, descending sequential movement. Prelude no. 4 is an homage to the Indian, in character rather than in musical material; no other composer
8
9 maximizes so successfully the instrument's resonance. Prelude no. 5 is a homage to Rio's social life, an affectionate looking back of a national hero on the struggles of his youth as a street musician. As in the studies, I use the composer's manuscripts for this recording. A linear historic perspective, in which periods succeed one another, cannot be applyed to the Brazilian artistic production. Racial heterogeneity, vast distances and social organization contribute to the fact that all historic periods co-exist and interact. Villa-Lobos' world is that of the abundance, the intoxication with the landscape and with the external influences, the fantastic mixture and glorious chaos of an euphoric Brazil.
FABIO ZANON
The Brazilian guitarist Fabio Zanon came to international prominence in 1996, when he won the first prize in the two most important international competitions (the 30th "Francisco Tarrega" Contest in Spain and the 14th Guitar Foundation of America Competition in the U.S.A.) within a few weeks of each other, an unprecedented achievement in the guitar world. His father was his first music teacher; he also studied with Antonio Guedes, Henrique Pinto and Edelton Gloeden. His first solo concert was
at the age of 16, and two years later he had his orchestral debut in Sao Paulo playing Villa-Lobos' Guitar Concerto. Nevertheless he only decided to become a professional performer after completing his education at the University of Sao Paulo in 1987 and after having had experiences as a composer, conductor, musicologist and writer. In 1986 and 87 he was awarded the coveted "Young Artists Prize" and the "Dell'Arte Prize" in Rio de Janeiro, which led to his first performances outside his native country. He followed the usual path of winning major prizes at international contests in Canada, Cuba, Italy and Spain, but, dissatisfied with his playing, he decided to re-elaborate his interpretive ideas. Accordingly, he moved to London in 1991 where he studied with Julian Bream and Michael Lewin at the Royal Academy of Music; he also obtained a Masters degree from the University of London. He emerged in 1993 with a formidable repertoire which includes more than twenty concertos and the most important solo guitar works, including all of Bach's lute, violin and cello works. He is a leading authority on Villa-Lobos; he has written and lectured extensively about his works. His debut at the Wigmore Hall in London was lauded by the press: "No praise can be too high. I have heard quite many guitarists over the last few years, but none to
rival this magnificent interpreter." (Musical Opinion); "Mr. Zanon possesses immaculate technique and is on the brink of complete artistic maturity. By any standards, a phenomenal performance." (Classical Guitar). At the time of writing, Mr. Zanon is beginning his first extended tour of the U.S. and Canada, which will be followed by tours of Central Europe, Scandinavia, Russia and Brazil. (1997)
PRODUCER
& ENGINEER: JOHN TAYLOR
Recording dates: May 4-8, 1997 in the Parish Church of the Holy Trinity, Weston, Hertfordshire, England.
Cover Illustration: Audrey L. Verso
Back Insert photo: Raquel Dias
Booklet photos: Courtesy of Museu VillaLobos and Brazilian Academy of Music
Design & layout: Audrey L. Verso
Made in the USA.
Warning: All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized duplication Is violation of applicable laws
0
