DESCRIPTION:
String Quartet No. 1, A. 099 (1915)

I. Cantilena
II. Brincadeira
III. Canto lirico
IV. Canconeta
V. Melancolia
VI. Saltando como um Saci

Cuarteto Latinoamericano

Heitor Villa-Lobos' first of 17 string quartets was written in 1915, and premiered in the 28-year-old composer's living room. In its collection of six short pieces, it is unlike the structure from any of the composer's subsequent works in the genre. But its attitude and general technique offer an ideal portrait of the composer at the time: a confident young man who, having across his spacious and widely varied homeland, drew from an encyclopedic array of native musical idioms. The work unfolds in an almost Schumannian tableau of sharply etched character pieces. But where Schumann, as both a German and Romantic, sketched his music in nocturnal, fitful bursts of detail and complexity, Villa-Lobos' suite of brief movements is sunlit into transparency, sweeping away, following a modernist impulse, the clutter of dark nineteenth century interiors. Indeed, this spontaneous transparency is a hallmark of the young composer's exhilarating creative self-confidence. Even amidst one of the darkest years of the twentieth century, Villa-Lobos' quartet offers a burst of facility, its nostalgia an unburdened evocation of idyll, its confidence matched only by its consoling eagerness to please. The opening "Cantilena," for instance, offers an unbelievably intimate lyricism with no reservations whatsoever, a love letter completely unburdened by the anxiety of confession or the fear of vulnerability. The following "Brincadiera" (Joke) is an impish, skipping ditty, while the "Canto lirico" that comes next returns to the temperament of the first movement. The final "Saltando como um saci" translates as Jumping Like a Saci, referring to Saci Perere, a red-capped dwarf from Brazilian mythology who hopped on his one leg and startled people during his nocturnal romps through the swampland. But while the title looks toward storytelling traditions, the music itself nods to the true ancestor of Villa-Lobos' quartet, at least in its unclouded tone and basic technique: Haydn. This witty finale is both a kind of folksy, high-spirited rondo and also a fugue; this unlikely pairing of the naïve and the learned, dance and counterpoint, was something Haydn cultivated like no one before him. Villa-Lobos surely intended a comparison, however modestly intoned; and it is clearly an intention of the quartet and of Villa-Lobos' music of the next four decades to engage in a Haydnesque project, colorfully cultivating the spirit of folklore with a panoply of quite unfolkloric tools. [allmusic.com]

Art by Brett Whiteley