Brazilian Music Beyond Heitor Villa-Lobos

from the Amazon.com Web page for the album being discussed

A little over two weeks ago Navona Records released CHORINHO a duo album of music by Brazilian composers performed by violist Georgina Rossi and pianist Silvie Cheng. The title is the diminutive of the instrumental Brazilian popular music genre choro. The latter is probably best known as the title of fourteen numbered compositions by Heitor Villa-Lobos; but it would be fair to say that those pieces are reflections on the genre, rather than instances of it. The same can be said of the seven compositions on the album, one of which is a waltz for solo piano by Villa-Lobos.

The only other composer on this album that I have previously encountered is Chiquinha Gonzaga, whose “Cananéa” waltz was included in the ten-CD anthology Three Centuries of Female Composers. On the new CHORINHO album, she claims the final track, which is “Lua branca” (white moon), an excerpt from her operetta O Forrobodó (the Forrobodó). Cheng and Rossi collaborated in arranging this music for viola with piano accompaniment. The album title is also the title of the opening track, a duo for viola and piano composed by João de Souza Lima. Only two other selections are duo performances, both three-movement works by Osvaldo Lacerda and Brenno Blauth.

The aforementioned waltz is Chang’s only solo turn. Rossi performs two works without accompaniment. The first of these is a three-movement suite by Ernani Aguair, the fifth in a series of compositions entitled Meloritmias. The other is a “little étude” (the Opus 78 “Pequeno Estudio”) by Lindembergue Cardoso. Taken as a whole, this amounts to a journey of discovery that lasts for about an hour and ten minutes.

Mind you, that makes for a generous amount of discovery. However, while one might find the full scope of these selections to be more than a little demanding in a recital setting, one can work one’s way through a recording by taking a piecemeal approach to the contents. For those that get their “portable music” through headphones (probably connected to a cell phone), one might acclimate to the repertoire simply by allowing it to serve as “background music.” While many may take that to be a heretical recommendation, the fact remains that one often begins to appreciate a “foreground experience” only after “background” sources have begun to register in memory. This is worth bearing in mind when one encounters works by six unfamiliar composers!