Search - Heitor Villa-Lobos, Sonia Rubinsky :: Villa-Lobos Piano Music: Guia Prático Nos. 1-9

Stunning Villa-Lobos Piano Versions of Brazilian Folksongs

J Scott Morrison | Middlebury VT, USA | 06/22/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"For anglophone musiclovers there is something irresistible about Iberian and Latin American folk music. Consider how influential the melodies and rhythms from Latin countries have been on the classical music of Europe and America from Glinka to Copland. In this collection of 48 brief piano pieces based on Brazilian children's folksongs Villa-Lobos has outdone himself in making what is putatively an educational venture on his part into an artistic triumph. As a young man he became involved in collecting folksongs from all over Brazil. In particular he made vocal arrangements of 137 of the tunes he and others had collected for use in schools; the collection was called 'Guia prático' ('Practical Guide'). Then he took sixty or so of them, arranged them imaginatively for piano solo -- each lasting only about a minute or so -- and had them published in twelve volumes also called 'Guia prático.' Nine of those volumes are recorded here by Sonia Rubinsky; we are told in the informative booklet notes by musicologist James Melo that the remaining three volumes have been recorded by Rubinsky and will be issued later.



Clearly these pieces are not for beginning piano students, however. Some of them could be played, probably, by intermediate students, but some are of such musical complexity and technical demands -- e.g. 'Vai Abóbora!' ('Some Pumpkin!'), Vol. VII, No. 2, or the toccata in all but name of 'Vamos Atraz da Serra, Oh! Calunga!' ('Let's Go Behind the Mountain, Oh! Calunga!'), Vol. VI, No. V -- that only a virtuoso could manage them. Best of all, Villa-Lobos keeps the necessarily simple melodies in the foreground -- indeed, one could sing their lyrics if one knew them -- but oh, what he does with the accompaniments! They are dizzyingly varied and inevitably engaging. (By the way, although Naxos does not print the song texts in the booklet, they do make them available in Portuguese with facing English translations as a viewable website and a downloadable pdf file at www.naxos.com/libretti/guiapratico.htm )



Brazilian-American pianist Sonia Rubinsky is in the process of recording the complete piano works of Villa-Lobos -- this is Volume 5 -- and clearly has his idiom in her fingers and heart. I have been very positive about previous volumes and am particularly happy with both the present music -- new to me -- and her performance of it.



An easy recommendation.



Scott Morrison"