Heitor VILLA-LOBOS
Symphonies nos. 6 “Sobre a linha das montanhas do Brasil” & 8. Suite for strings.
SWR RSO / Carl St. Clair.
Rec 2000?
CPO 999 517-2 [65.00?]
(Seealso Review by Colin Clarke)
Heitor VILLA-LOBOS
Symphonies nos. 4, “Victoria” & 12.
SWR RSO / Carl St. Clair.
Rec 1999?
CPO 999 525-2 [63.00?]
Villa-Lobos Symphonies: An Uneven but Valuable Survey
The Brazilian symphonic tradition has never quite seized the international imagination the way Villa-Lobos’s more flamboyant works have—those Bachianas Brasileiras with their cello choirs and pseudo-Bach, or the riotous Chôros. Perhaps that’s as it should be. Villa-Lobos was fundamentally a composer of color and gesture, not architectural proportion, and the symphony as a form demands a kind of sustained argument that wasn’t really his métier.
Still, this ongoing CPO series from Carl St. Clair and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra makes a persuasive case that we’ve been missing something. Not masterpieces, exactly—though the Fourth comes close—but substantial works that deserve better than the neglect they’ve suffered.
The Symphony No. 4, “Victory,” dating from 1919, remains the most frequently encountered of the twelve, and here it blazes. St. Clair understands that this score is essentially a concerto for orchestra disguised in symphonic garb—Villa-Lobos showing off his instrumental palette with almost Straussian bravado. The Stuttgart players navigate the dazzling woodwind filigree in the first movement with a precision that Villa-Lobos himself, conducting the French Radio orchestra for EMI in the 1950s, never quite achieved. That old release has a certain disheveled authenticity, true enough. But the music itself—dense, brilliantly scored, propulsive—benefits from the kind of technical finish the Germans provide. The slow movement (which Villa-Lobos perversely places second, disrupting the usual symphonic flow) unfolds with genuine breadth, though one wishes for a touch more rhythmic elasticity in the syncopated episodes.
The Eighth, from 1950, strikes me as nearly as successful. Here Villa-Lobos seems to have learned something about pacing—the first movement doesn’t sprawl quite so much, and the long slow movement that forms the expressive core of the work has real gravitas. The scoring remains thick, sometimes congested, but there’s an imagination at work that transcends mere competence. St. Clair shapes the finale’s peroration with conviction, building to a conclusion that actually feels earned rather than tacked on.
But then there’s the Sixth, “On the Profiles of the Mountains of Brazil,” from 1944, and here we encounter the problem that dogs this entire symphonic enterprise. Villa-Lobos claimed to have derived his themes from the visual contours of Brazilian mountain ranges—he’d done something similar with the Manhattan skyline in 1939—and the result feels exactly as contrived as that process suggests. Solid, yes. The mountains stand there, immovable. But where’s the wildness, the unpredictability that makes Villa-Lobos Villa-Lobos? The scherzo has some typically brilliant wind writing, but overall the piece never quite catches fire. St. Clair and his forces seem to sense this; the reading is dutiful rather than inspired.
The Twelfth, Villa-Lobos’s final symphony from 1957, occupies an odd middle ground. It was well received at its premiere, and one can hear why—it’s cleanly crafted, avoids the Sixth’s stiffness, moves along agreeably enough. But memorable? Not really. It sounds like a work from a composer who’d said what he had to say in the form and was going through the motions, however expertly.
The real question hanging over this entire project is whether Villa-Lobos was truly a symphonist at all. Most of these works follow a predictable template: preludial first movement, extended slow movement (the real heart of the matter), scherzo, expansive finale attempting some kind of Mahlerian synthesis. But formal templates don’t make symphonies—sustained musical thinking does. And Villa-Lobos, for all his genius, thought in episodes and colors rather than in the kind of long-range tonal and thematic processes that define the great symphonic tradition.
None of which diminishes what CPO and St. Clair have accomplished here. The recorded sound is superb—rich, detailed, with real depth and presence. The Stuttgart orchestra plays with a polish that reveals every strand of Villa-Lobos’s often dense textures. And St. Clair clearly believes in this music; he doesn’t condescend to it or treat it as exotic curiosity.
The Suite for Strings, included on the disc with the Sixth, provides welcome relief—a slighter work, certainly, but one that plays to Villa-Lobos’s strengths. Here the episodic structure feels natural rather than forced.
I’ll continue following this series with interest, even if the symphonies themselves remain, for me at least, more valuable than indispensable. Villa-Lobos’s achievement lies elsewhere. But these performances make the strongest possible case for the music, and that’s no small thing.
