Villa-Lobos: Sonate-fantaisie No. 1 for violin & piano, Op. 27 'Désespérance'

In Europe Brazilian music is generally identified with the works by Villa-Lobos, the great 20th-century composer who unquestionably marked, with his strong personality, the music life of Brazil. Beside him, however, a number of other important composers, such as Edino Krieger, Ronaldo Miranda and Enrique Oswald, endeavoured to develop autonomous expressive languages which might be at the same time traditional and open to the new. In the present CD the most popular Brazilian violinist of the day, Claudio Cruz, and the pianist Nahim Marun offer a fascinating anthology of works for violin and piano written by the above-mentioned authors, all highly original as well as rarely recorded.

Although he is the most productive composer of our century (1065 numbers in the catalogue), only a small part of the work of Heitor Villa-Lobos is known, including the famous Choros et Bachianas brasileiras. It can be said that Villa-Lobos was a self-taught musician; he learnt the guitar, the cello and commenced his musical career playing in cafés and with street musicians, before embarking on a long journey across Brazil from 1908 to 1912. He absorbed the musical traditions of his country, but was also influenced by European composers and he finished by combining all this material, which was both popular and erudite, to create a music with an extraordinary freedom of language. Paul Klinck and Claude Coppens offer a first, the complete work for violin and piano; in addition to the three Sonates-Fantaisies (the score of the fourth was in all likelihood lost between France and Brazil in 1930), we discover for the first time six small pieces, seductive miniatures which are easily accessible and complete an exceptional disk.

Heitor Villa-Lobos composed prolifically in every genre, but his chamber music has not received the attention of his richly scored, opulent accomplishments in the fields of orchestral and vocal music, as well as the cello-saturated Bachianas Brasilieras. These three sonatas were written between 1912 and 1920 and are full of entirely characteristic, colourful melodic vocabulary, structured as extended rhapsodies.