Villa-Lobos premieres

Synopsis

For decades, Russian-born American composer, conductor and witty musical lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky compiled the reference work Music Since 1900. It’s a year-by-year, month-by-month, day-by-day chronicle of musical events he deemed significant, interesting, or simply amusing.

Here, for example, is Slonimsky’s entry for July 15, 1942:

“Heitor Villa-Lobos conducts in Rio de Janeiro the first performances of three of his orchestral Choros: No. 6, No. 9 and No. 11, exhaling the rhythms, the perfumes and the colors of the Brazilian scene, with tropical birds exotically chanting in the woodwinds against the measured beats of jungle drums.”

Slonimsky did have a way with words, and certainly had fun compiling his mammoth (and highly readable) reference work.

For his part, Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos was equally diligent, so much so that he claimed he couldn’t always remember everything that he had written. His Choros No. 11 for piano and orchestra lasts some 65 minutes and is one of his most ambitious works. Originally the word “choro” meant improvised music by Brazilian street musicians, but Villa-Lobos always used the word in its plural form to describe over a dozen of his instrumental works.

Music Played in Today's Program

Heitor Villa Lobos (1887-1959): Choros No. 9; Hong Kong Philharmonic; Kenneth Schermerhorn, conductor; Naxos 8.555241