Villa-Lobos: Forest of the Amazon**
Renée Fleming, soprano; Chorus of the Moscow Physics and Engineering Institute; Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra/Alfred Heller
Delos DE 1037 [74:05]
What do you do with seventy-four minutes of music rescued from a doomed Hollywood picture? Villa-Lobos faced this question in his final months—he died in November 1959, having completed Forest of the Amazon as a symphonic poem after MGM’s Green Mansions sank without trace. The film, starring Audrey Hepburn in an ill-conceived adaptation of W.H. Hudson’s novel, used almost none of Villa-Lobos’s score. One can understand why. This is music conceived in discrete segments, cues meant to underscore dialogue and action, not to sustain purely musical argument across an hour and a quarter.
Alfred Heller, who studied with Villa-Lobos and has championed this work with admirable devotion, presents what he calls the first complete release. The forces are massive—a very large orchestra bristling with Brazilian percussion, a male chorus chanting what sounds like invented Amerindian syllables (no text is provided, possibly because there isn’t one), and a soprano soloist for four Portuguese songs. The orchestration teems with color. That’s the right word for Villa-Lobos’s Amazon, actually: teeming. Chattering woodwinds, growling brass, layer upon layer of percussion creating a sonic jungle canopy.
But teeming isn’t the same as developing, and here’s the problem that dogs this project from start to finish. Twenty separate numbers, most quite short, follow one another without discernible symphonic logic. The music doesn’t grow or transform—it simply accumulates. A pensive nocturne gives way to a raucous dance, which yields to a choral incantation, which dissolves into orchestral scene-painting. Each segment has its own character, sometimes quite striking, but they don’t add up to a coherent symphonic statement.
Vaughan Williams managed it with Sinfonia Antartica, another film score refashioned as concert work. That score, equally episodic in origin, found structural bones to support its length. Villa-Lobos, weakened by illness and working against time, apparently didn’t have the strength or perhaps the inclination to do the same thorough renovation. What we have instead feels like a suite that doesn’t know when to stop—or perhaps twenty suites compressed into one sitting.
The individual songs for soprano offer the strongest material. Renée Fleming, captured here early in her career, already possessed that refulgent, creamy tone that would make her a star. Her Portuguese diction seems serviceable if not idiomatic, and she shapes Villa-Lobos’s long-limbed melodic lines with real beauty. “Sentimental Melody” (track 18) gives her the kind of soaring lyric opportunity she was born for, and she seizes it with both hands. The voice gleams.
The Moscow forces acquit themselves professionally with what must have been utterly foreign music. The orchestra plays with reasonable color and precision, though one suspects a Brazilian ensemble would have found more juice in the rhythmic writing. The male chorus contributes atmospheric chanting that grows wearisome—this is music crying out for an editor’s blue pencil. Twenty minutes gone, minimum, and the work might breathe.
Heller’s conducting seems committed, even passionate, but the liner notes reveal more about the score’s troubled genesis than about what actually happens in these twenty movements. A detailed track-by-track guide to the narrative would have helped enormously. Most listeners won’t know Green Mansions from Green Acres, and without some programmatic scaffolding, the music’s succession of moods and textures feels arbitrary.
So where does this leave us? Villa-Lobos completists will want this rarity—it’s the composer’s last orchestral work, after all, and it contains passages of genuine imagination. Fleming’s admirers will treasure her contributions. But as a concert work, Forest of the Amazon doesn’t convince. It remains what it was: film music, episodic and functional, dressed up in concert clothes that don’t quite fit. The seams show, and no amount of lush orchestration can hide them. A fascinating document, certainly. A successful symphonic poem? I’m afraid not.
