Total Immersion: Villa-Lobos/BBC Symphony Orchestra, Barbican Hall - classical review

A day dedicated to Brazil’s most celebrated composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos, showed ample evidence of vivid imagination
Nick Kimberley10 March 2014

With football’s World Cup in Brazil approaching, it was canny of the BBC Symphony Orchestra to devote its latest Total Immersion day to the country’s most celebrated composer, Heitor Villa-Lobos.

His best-known works are his Bachianas brasileiras, which filter Bach’s musical style through the exuberant melancholy of Brazilian folk idioms. Although the Bach link was often tenuous, the set occupied Villa-Lobos for 15 years, 1930-45 (he died in 1959).

The most familiar is No 5, for soprano and eight cellos, so popular that even Joan Baez has recorded it.

Here, Finnish soprano Anu Komsi, wife of the concert’s conductor, Sakari Oramo, was not as pure as some but her control of vocal weight was ultra-fine.

Villa-Lobos was frighteningly prolific. He called his most substantial set of works Chôros, from the Portuguese word for “weeping”. He wrote more than a dozen of them; Oramo included two. With two pianos pounding away deep in the orchestral mix, No 8 (1925) had an elemental surge, like Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring reimagined as the score for a Forties film noir. At times in Chôros No 10 (1926), the harps sounded like pianos, the piano like percussion and the percussion like insects or a herd of rampaging beasts. Meanwhile, the chorus chitter-chattered angrily.

As its title suggests, Symphony No 9 proved more orthodox, more classical, but still there was ample evidence of vivid imagination, notably in the way that the second movement slithered into motion, and in the big band splash that brought the piece to a resonant close.

Perhaps this concert signals a Villa-Lobos revival.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in